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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!"
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.
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.
Hey, it worked with firewire and thunderbolt.
http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/
Don't be ridiculous, the NSA control the backbone and one you have control of the backbone you don't NEED backdoors, all you need is a datacenter fast enough to process the data. Say someplace in Utah maybe?
As for TFA all the group does is let you use the little USB logo, who cares? How many people actually look for or even know WTF the little USB logo is? Not many. Just call it "USB compatible" and all it a day.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Um, except that as well as the logo you need to pick a VID/PID for your device. This is how operating systems tell which driver to connect to a USB device. So if you and someone else pick the same ones...
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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.
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?
Where they have always been hiding - in the hardware itself. It's pretty safe to say that there will never be open-source silicon, and there will probably never be DIY silicon fabbing at home.
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.
Of course, you could just follow the prominent link in the HaD article through to my original post, where the entire conversation is quoted in full.
Did anyone else misread the title as "USB Implanters ..." and think of http://xkcd.com/644/ ???
That problem already exists. I've had quite a few devices that use the Prolific PL-2303 chip in it. Ok, we know it's a USB serial chip, and it's VID_067B&PID_2303. That doesn't really tell us anything about what's on the other side of it.
The Prolific site says that counterfeits exist., and I'm pretty sure I've run into a few. One was a programming cable for a Chinese made HAM radio. The Prolific supplied driver doesn't work with it, so I had to switch to another that I found in a group somewhere that did work. So now I have the wrong PL-2303 driver loaded up, which can interfere with other devices.
Even the legitimate PL-2303 chip devices can be troublesome. Which one is the device I think I'm using? What if I want 10 devices plugged in, and the application that goes with it scans and picks a random one? Then I'm still screwed. And ya, I've seen it happen.
Luckily for me, I only use them occasionally, so they stay unplugged until I'm ready to use them, and then I scan screw with uninstalling and installing different drivers until it works.
Forced expensive licensing for a de facto standard interface is dumb. It's even dumber where the interface has "universal" in the name. Like, it should just work anywhere, not just for organizations that paid for expensive licensing.
If I made a cool device right now, and I wanted to start selling them, thousands of dollars for licensing is probably way out of budget. I'd like to plug it in and have it identify as "JWSmythe USB Widget 14". If it costs me $5 to produce, and I sell at $10, the $5,000 "membership" fee won't be practical until I've sold over 5,000 units. Even then, it's just lowered my profit to $0. Ya, I know the $5k doesn't get me the VID/PID, so extend the number of no-profit units sold accordingly.
Since anything I'd make would probably be a low unit run, I'd never sell enough to pay for the VID/PID.
The ugly but practical way to do it is to just pick a VID/PID combination not being used, and hope the USB group doesn't notice me.
Disclaimer: I don't produce any hardware widgets, and I'm not hijacking unused VID/PID combinations. This was for illustration purposes only.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And I want to know your Slashdot nickname, too. I suspect YOU are concealing something. Oh wait.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
OK ... let's start a campaign to NOT buy USB. But we need something. Let's make our own replacement.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
It's hard to imagine a better example of ignorance. What you describe is exactly what happens. There is even a standard register-level interface that a host controller must implement, so that the same driver should work for any host controller from any manufacturer. These are known as UHCI, OHCI, EHCI and XHCI for devices supporting USB 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively.
None of that tells the OS what to do with the data once its been received and transferred into system memory. And so each device needs... drumroll... a driver!
Actually it's not even that bad. There are standard interfaces defined for certain classes of devices (HID for keyboards and mice etc, USB audio, USB video and some others) and these, at least theoretically, can share the same driver software between devices from different manufacturers.
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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)
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!