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USB Implementers Forum Won't Play Nice With Open Hardware
DeathToBill writes "Hack A Day reports on the attempts of open hardware hackers to obtain a vendor and product ID for their devices to be able to sell them as USB compliant: 'A not for profit foundation [in this case Arachnid Labs] could buy a VID, give PIDs away to foundation members making open source hardware, and we would all live in a magical world of homebrew devices that are certified as USB compliant.' The USB Implementers Forum, which controls the sale of PIDs, has lawyered up, responding to the effort with a cease and desist notice, requiring Arachnid Labs to stop 'raising funds to purchase a unique USB VID' and 'delete all references to the USB-IF, VIDs and PIDs for transfer, resale or sublicense from your website and other marketing materials.' A slight over-reaction? Or dark conspiracy against open hardware? You decide!"
Terrible
What does it imply not being certified as USB compliant?
If you have USB and people use it and it works and reviewers use it and just say "it has USB"...
What I mean is: Is it forbidden by law to say "It's got USB" if it's not certified as USB compliant?
You don't make hardware USB-compliant simply by having a PID&VID. And the process - as with most processes where numbers are assigned (consider, for example, the IANA) - doesn't admit subversion by buying up a block of numbers then re-selling.
But now I have a VID :(
Why not both?
Don't cabals typically react with all the violence they can feel they can get away with?
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Once open source software is pervasive, where else are NSA back doors going to hide? The Hardware.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
So, The USB Implementers Forum is a cartel intended to make sure only approved corporations can play the game then?
And, once again, corporations take over everything and the rest of us can eat cake. Color me totally un-surprised.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Did you expect anything else ?
Next up, don't raise funds for licencing, raise funds to sue their asses instead unless they can give a valid, legal reason not to.
It's quite understandable. Since a badly built commercial or home device can destroy the USB port on a computer or even feed back enough energy to destroy other components, making the "USB compliant" certification freely available without some trace of contractual responsibility is dangerousl. We went through this with Microsoft and their "Java" labels on their box. It would be too easy for those "magically freed" vendors to make, and sell, incompatible or even destructive hardware.
As an electrical engineer who loves his homebrew, I would not trust myself to roll my own USB compliant device. I could probably build something that wouldn't bring down the bus but a fully compliant device is a whole 'nother story.
We could always take the Palm Pre strategy and just spoof a USB address and behavior. It fooled iTunes. But even that changes if you are gonna sell stuff.
To clarify: Issuing VIDs, and logo licensing & compliance testing are entirely distinct things. Every USB device must have a unique PID/VID combination, used to identify a device and load correct drivers. In order to produce your own device, you must have a VID of your own (in which case you manage PID allocation), or get a PID from someone else - a practice USB-IF frowns upon outside certain strictly defined circumstances. Obtaining a VID without USB-IF membership costs a one off fee of $5000. Having a VID doesn't entitle you to use the USB logo. Independent of getting a VID, you can become a USB-IF logo licensee or member ($3500, or $4000/year respectively) and certify your devices, whereupon they can bear the USB logo. The HaD post, and my original post that it's based upon, is entirely about the issue of obtaining VIDs and PIDs for hobbyists; certification is a separate matter.
These guys won't be able to pull it off now, but they could form a new corp with a new name, say they want to build usb connected gadgets, get their ID, *AND THEN* start sharing. It would probably help to get a device in the wild first so there isn't some sort of revocation issue.
Another "open" group that has no money trying to get something for nothing. No, you cannot sublet your VID. It is assigned to your company. So of course these fools are breaking the rules; they knew they were going in (I assume they know how to read). Then they whine about how they are being stopped from breaking the rules. Good god! Guess what? Going open and free is HARD. It costs money besides just time and commitment.
Just make a new set of stickers, labels, etc which say "USB Certified Experimental" and let them use those.
If it's good enough for the FAA it should be good enough for USB.
USB2.0 didn't "beat" Firewire, because Firewire had already failed. USB2.0 was an attempt to plug the resulting gap in the market for a high-speed bus. If Firewire hadn't been an expensive pain in the ass, we'd be using USB for our keyboards and printers and Firewire for our portable drives as originally intended.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Hey! You've spent lots of money developing something - WE WANT IT FOR FREE! What? You won't give it to us for free? You horrible monster...
Sigh.
They developed the technology behind the USB standard. They get to set the rules for its use. This is not some air-puffed patent (like wedge-shaped laptops or the 'look-n-feel' of an icon). This really is intellectual property that took effort to design. They have every right in the world to control how that technology is used and charge whatever they want to charge for it.
Our decision as consumers it whether to buy it or not.
Economics 101 folks. People have to make a living and in particular when real effort is expended on something, they have to show a profit for that effort.
I worked on both VHS and Betamax video tape recorders as both an operator and a repair technician from the time the bloody things were invented until Beta finally died.
Consumer Betamax video tape recorders were not technically better than VHS. They just weren't, no matter how many times people parrot this nonsense. I personally set them up, ran them, fixed them for at least a decade. The tape path and mechanics of beta were fucking retarded compared to VHS, and that's why even cheap shoddy VHS mechanisms worked just as well as expensive Sony betamax machines!
No human being could tell the difference in picture quality after the machines were more than two weeks old, because there wasn't any once they'd been used for a while. We used to challenge customers on brand new machines and nobody could ever successfully do it, not ever. For all practical purposes they were identical, Beta's tiny horizontal sync advantage evaporated in real use and the resolution was the same.
In the Real World[tm] VHS machines were more economical, more reliable, just as high fidelity, and recorded longer. Betamax was an also-ran second best and that's why VHS won.
Wikipedia has plenty of proof if you won't believe hands-on experience. Stop repeating this total bullshit fanboy crap.
Call it dip usb compliant no one gives a rats ass they just care it works.
I have been computing for neigh on to 35 years and have never siad is it this or that compliant standing in the line at fry electronics or the other stores that came before them.
Now have I heard from others or read an article about how good something is has talked me into trying it.
You can go around these butt munches with no ill effect.
TFA quotes that one sentence from the VTM Group lawyers. It needs to show more. Did they write more and TFA is deliberately concealing VTM Group's explanation since the facts might bias peoples' opinions? Or did the lawyers really write a letter containing only that one sentence (which would be interesting too)?
I'd actually like to know whether this is faceless reasonless stonewalling, or if maybe VTM Group had a justification (whether good or bad) for their request.
By concealing this, I think hackaday.com has shown poor editorial policy and Brian Benchoff is a basically dishonest and untrustworthy person. Of course, that's just my quick uninformed opinion, due to the nature of the story. But forming a quick uninformed opinions is the whole point of writing like that, isn't it, Mr. Benchoff?
Did anyone else misread the title as "USB Implanters ..." and think of http://xkcd.com/644/ ???
If you buy a washing machine in Europe, there's probably a sticker on it telling you to only use Calgon with it and nothing else. Guess what, they work with any old washing powder. And just as well. Why bother paying for a USB-logo to go with your open hardware? Everybody knows how to plug it in, and nobody will think twice before doing so. Logo or no logo.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
This is NOT about open-hardware, no-one gives a damn about that issue. This IS about companies like Microsoft and Sony launching new consoles, and ensuring that old USB/Blutooth peripherals will NOT work on them. Why? Because MS and Sony need to recoup profits from vastly over-priced peripherals to compensate for the insane costs associated with launching the consoles themselves.
USB has moved from "it just works" (plug-n-play) to "you need the official branded peripheral to work with your new console". For Bluetooth and USB, this DESTROYS consumer confidence in the standards. Xbox One and PS4 customers are vastly unhappy, for instance, that their high-quality expensive bluetooth headsets will NOT be compatible with the new consoles.
It gets WORSE. The USB/Bluetooth authorities actively ENCOURAGE MS and Sony to use paid shills to sell a line of BS explaining to the sheeple why an inability to use their old peripherals is a "good" thing. This means that the industry is actually backing massive fragmentation of once unified classes of USB/bluetooth peripherals.
You no longer have a bluetooth headphone (running of the established audio stack). Instead you have a Xbox One only bluetooth headphone, using the bluetooth manufacturer ID bytes to artificially limit connectivity of other peripherals with identical function.
The same applies now with USB. Instead of the CLASS of device being considered for connectivity, it is now the BRAND. This cynical abuse of bluetooth and USB standards trashes the entire point of why USB and bluetooth exist in the first place.
ATI is doing the same thing with the digital standards that connect their card to the monitor. If ATI doesn't find its own brand of cable, it disables the transmission of audio channels over this cable.
Such abuses will have but one consequence- a complete disregard for the 'truthfulness' of the ID-bytes present in a peripherals ROM. Now, third party peripheral companies have a positive incentive to CLONE the synthetic values that allow peripherals to work of the Xbox One and PS4. These values are NOT protected under any IP law. Indeed, it is a criminal act for Sony and MS to artificially restrict the use of third party peripherals in the EU. The bodies that oversee USB and Bluetooth licences are going to have an impossible task explaining why the abuse of the brand-ID bytes should not lead to legal action by EU trade commissioners.
In addition to trademarks, one must also consider patents. Patents last 20 years and, if properly constructed, cover anything compatible with the standard. USB 1.1 came out in 1998.
The easiest way to blow this up is for the open hardware community to simply delcare, "Hey, USB-IF, we've decided we're going to sqat on this VID, namely , so be sure not to hand it out. We'll handle PID allocation under it.". The USB-IF is completely impotent to do anything about it. There are already numerous products that use randomly chosed VID/PID combinations that are *not* registered with USB-IF, and USB-IF does nothing about it. It is true that these products don't use the USB logo, no license fee paid, obviously, but also in part because they aren't USB devices in the traditional sense -- most of them simply used USB as a way to re-flash firmware or as debug ports, so consumers don't really buy the product for the USB functionality.
IMHO, the best way to handle this, though, would be to simply squat on a VID *without* making a beligerant declaration to the USB-IF. After a dozen or so USB devices get popular, then USB-IF will have no recourse except to write off the VID as a dead loss and move on. After all, they've already had to do that with the VIDs used by the current squatters that we just never hear about.
The only stick USB-IF can beat you with is the license needed to use the logo. If you don't care about the logo, then there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, that keeps you from sqatting on a VID.
If one spills something all over the floor, I'd still find "the spill was cleaned up" grammatical.
It's the de facto standard for computer connections, in that nowhere does it say that computers should or must use USB.
Mobile phones sold in certain parts of Europe must either use a USB micro-B charging port or be bundled with an adapter from USB micro-B to the charging port.
They're trying to get certified, not start a debate about its merits.
This may just be some crossed wires; the company tasked with handling the trademarks, legal papers, etc is just doing what they believe they are supposed to do: stop anyone from getting a Vendor ID, then subverting the normal USB process by sublicensing Product IDs. It is totally understandable that this would subvert the process and take control away from the USB-IF.
USB-IF does offer some VID blocks for testing, hobbyist, etc purposes.
They are also more than happy to sell you a VID block for $5000, even if you never bother to get a device certified or use the USB logo and trademarks.
What they are not currently setup to do is offer a "small" block at a cheaper price to someone who wants to sell a product commercially, but one that has a very limited run. It seems like they could easily set aside one VID for this purpose, then "subnet" that into different PID blocks. Offer a set of 10 PIDs for $100 for small companies. Would that not solve the problem?
You have to remember: USB-IF is not making money here; it is a non-profit itself. The fees go toward covering their costs.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Meh, do you guys have any idea just how BROKEN a lot of the crappierst USB devices are? These things fail to properly implement the most basic details of the USB specification, to the point of actually crashing the USB bus if not properly worked around in the host controller drivers! Never mind just how crappy many of the implementations of the generic USB classes (like "storage") are: you talk to them as you're supposed to, they destroy data.
As far as I'm concerned, the USB-IF can hang themselves. They do not sue to oblivion the manufacturers that sell crap with USB logos, nor do they take the required pains to actually properly certify products to properly *implement correctly* the standards. Their process does NOT reach the target of "reasonable compliance" for any decent definition of "reasonable".
My guess is that when asked this question, the USB-IF has a standard response of "Please don't do that!" And then for people who do, they may follow up with another sternly-written letter.
I was going to post on here with some links to places I had seen before where PIDs used to be available. http://www.voti.nl was the one I was going to list. I went to their site, which now states that they have also received a similar nastygram from the USB-IF.
So it seems like the USB-IF is cracking down on what used to be allowed.
The fee to purchase a VID has also gone up in the last 5 years. Gee, I wonder if that's a coincidence?
Will the open source hardware vendors fulfill the voltage & current requirements of USB?
What if they're off spec and end up burning out someone else's equipment? Who's liable?
Consider how Blu-Ray has settled into the niche, high-end "I have a 800-inch TV and 13-point surround sound" video/audiophile nerd zone, while DVD still kicks its butt by being available to anyone who can scrape together $20 for a player, $20 for a tv of any sort (even an old CRT still works w/ it), and $5-10 a month for a Netflix subscription
You had a few good points there, until you asserted that DVD "kicks its butt" with respect to Blu-Ray. I must assume you're either vision-impaired or have never seen a movie in 1080p. DVD video is so poor incomparsion that I can't even stand to watch it anymore. It looks like absolute crap, the same way standard definition TV looks like crap compared to HDTV.
Part of the whole Bluray spec was that they would only allow manufacturers to include component out for X number of years. I think composite out is still allowed, but I could be wrong on that.
I actually gave my Bluray player to a relative who had a nice older LCD TV with no digital inputs because my player was old enough to have component out.
There's a company that licensed a VID before usb.org prohibited sub-selling PIDs and sells them here.
OpenMoko are licensing their PIDs for FOSS use here.
List of zombie VIDs here.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
The Streisand effect...
Shutup and get them panties off!
[...] and the rest of us can eat cake.
the cake is a lie!