Is BLE qualification required for proprietary service?

[Volodymyr]

Since related topic Is BLE changing licensing policy? was marked as resolved I moved my question to new one. My company is ready to get SIG membership for BLE usage and pay the fee. The only question is whether we need to pass qualification test if:

1. we are not going to use any Bluetooth logo or trademark on box, device
2. device will use the only proprietary BLE service
3. we don't even want to be compatible with any other profile or service
4. BLE is not the main service of our product
5. BLE will be used between our product and our application.

I would be really thankful for a piece of help. Thank you. PS. Tried to understand legal documents but unfortunately I am not lawyer.

[Volodymyr]

Thank you John for an effort. Unfortunately, I cannot use qualified module. We are going to use open-source Bluez with a chip without qualification. It is OK to pay the fee for our product, probably we already have got SIG membership.

BUT: We are using the only proprietary BLE service which won't be easy to qualify using PTS. To pass that qualification we need for sure to implement separate FW image which will support mandatory BLE options. It will take some time. The time, as usual, is the most expensive thing in our life. :-(

[Volodymyr]

Thank you again, you are pushing me to solution. As far as I understood, Nordic provides papers for Soft Device that is a FW on a chip. The chip is controlled over HCI. So, open source Bluez could easy work with that chip.

In your case you passed partial qualification "Start B" in www.bluetooth.org/.../qualification-overview

As far as I know, my chip passed RF test, need to double check. But I don't understand what is relation between RF and product listening. I see next ways:

1. Change chip to Nordic one(small probability), get papers from Nordic, get product listing, pay SIG
2. Ask current vendor for papers (almost impossible), get product listing, pay SIG
3. Do whole qualification of the current chip ourself by creating test FW, get product listing, pay SIG Tough life. :-(

Did you try to use PTS to test and pass qualification?

Thank you for your help.