Wow, wouldn’t have guessed that, welcome onboard sailor!
Jolla actually asked what kind of referral system community wanted and we voted for no discount option 
We got referral system where we would get T-shirt, so that Jolla gets most of the funds to improve Sailfish. Jolla Phone update - referral program
This is what I hope from bottom of my heart. With this phone they exceeded all their goals and probably will sell something like 20-30k phones. For next phone I would love them to be in the 100 000s league, which would already give significantly better economies of scale. Or that one of the European HW companies like Fairphone licenses Sailfish to their phone.
Well to me it seems like Sony might have lost interest of the open device program. Or something has happened as Sony blobs are still so useless after almost 3 years after including the 10 V in the open device program. And personally I think it makes much more sense to then make own platform where you shouldn’t be on so much mercy of the others (Sony in this case). +Jolla can get much more money out of it. Historically consumer business has been only very small portion of Jolla’s business but luckily Jolla phone will shift that a little bit. Of course Jolla could try to find workarounds with the current blobs but that wouldn’t benefit SFOS generally and as they already have very limited resources I think they are better used with actual SFOS development, like camera api 2.
Correct me if I am wrong, but GOS doesn’t do actual business (at least with Pixels)? They live of donations, right? As Sailfish isn’t android fork, I don’t know if Sailfish could even be just build on top of AOSP like android forks can? My understanding is that Sailfish mainly uses the drivers which are all developed for android, but this is territory where I have very limited knowledge. And I doubt that license of AOSP allows even build anything commercial on top of it? Sony open device program allows commercial use which I believe is why they have historically used legacy Sony devices. But of course then they are on mercy of Sony to make the drivers etc to work, which we have seen isn’t the best strategy. Sony has done quite badly with 10 IV and 10 V cases and a lot of people are blaming Jolla for that.
Hopefully I was able to answers at least some questions