The things people say when they stop being polite

A fair question, and the honest answer is that you are paying us for everything except the desktop. You can download a free distribution this afternoon, and a business licence for a polished one costs around € 40 per computer per major version, bought again at every release. Ours is € 80, 65 or 55 once, year one of support inside, then € 12 and € 15 a year for support and upgrades, the next release included. Over five years that is € 112 to € 137 per workstation, roughly the bare licence bought twice, and the difference buys the list below.

What you are paying for is everything an organisation needs around that desktop and that you have to find yourself alongside a distribution:

• A European supplier who signs a contract, a processing agreement and an exit arrangement, and who carries the liability that comes with them
• Your own line-of-business applications tested per organisation, before anything is rolled out
• Central management that works today, rather than a management platform still announced as coming
• Responsibility under the Cyber Resilience Act and the Accessibility Act sitting with the supplier instead of with your own IT department
• One number to call when four hundred workstations do something unexpected on a Monday morning

Put differently: the software is the cheap part. Migrating an organisation is the expensive part, and that is where a supplier earns its fee.

We understand where that impression comes from, because NEXZOS deliberately builds on an existing kernel. What sits above it is architecture, and so more than a theme or a coat of paint.

Every successful operating system builds on existing layers. Windows runs on the NT kernel, Android is Linux, macOS is BSD. The question is what you structurally enforce above it.

What NEXZOS enforces above it, and where it differs from existing desktop systems:

• Privacy by design as an operating system default, in the core logic rather than in a policy or an add-on
• GDPR and data sovereignty built in natively, on European cloud assumptions
• Identity and permission control at operating system level, so across all applications
• Security orchestration instead of a stack of separate security tools
• A governance-ready architecture, aimed at government, healthcare and education

If NEXZOS really were Linux with a layer on top, Microsoft, Apple or Google would have released it years ago. That it is still there is the opening: building it would break their own revenue model.

In short: Linux is the foundation. NEXZOS is the governance model above it, and that is where the work sits.

That is a fair reading, and it is exactly the risk we avoid. AI sits here in the foundation rather than in a separate feature or a marketing layer, and in this phase we deliberately keep it in the background, so that it stays coherent.

NEXZOS is built as AI-ready infrastructure, rather than as an AI product. The investment goes first into an affordable, legal operating system for every user, energy use, hardware lifespan, and governance at operating system level: security, identity, data separation and compliance. Only on that foundation can AI be deployed coherently and safely.

Building every AI capability ourselves we deliberately leave to others. There are AI companies that are technically far ahead but stuck on distribution, compliance or trust. That missing layer is what NEXZOS is.

Anyone who needs a finished product today chooses something else. What we offer is a smaller commitment than a normal purchase: an assessment you keep, then a pilot on your own hardware with acceptance criteria you set yourself, and a decision point after every step.

Going first also buys something only the first gets: your requirements shape the roadmap while it is still being written. That is the actual trade, and we would rather state it plainly than dress it up as an honour.

A real risk with a small supplier, and the honest answer is a set of arrangements rather than a reassurance. Source code escrow with a third party can be arranged, so can an exit arrangement with return of your data, and every phase is paid for what it delivered, so on a stop you keep what has been delivered and you are done.

Those arrangements are put in place with the agreement. They are offers, and we say so on every page where they appear.

They are right to open there, and the assessment exists for exactly that conversation. It produces the list of machines that qualify, the applications that need work, and the risks with names attached. If that list says the risk is too high for your organisation, you have spent between € 675 and € 1,750 to find out, and we would rather you learn it then than in month eight of a rollout.

Note also what the alternative costs. Windows 10 Extended Security Updates end in October 2028, and waiting is itself a decision with a date on it.