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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?
But now I have a VID :(
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.
No.
Hey, it worked with firewire and thunderbolt.
http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/
It's like getting a driver's licence and then lending it to your friends and relatives so they can go for a drive. You're completely ignoring the whole point of certification, whether you agree with certification or not.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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.
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.
RTFA. It specifically mentions three licensed vendors (Microchip, FTDI, and Openmoko) that already do exactly that. So no, this has nothing to do with quality control, and everything to do with control control.
Personally, though, I don't see the problem. VTM apparently thinks much too highly of their coveted IP, blinding them to the reality of their situation - They have "Xerox"ed themselves. Kleenex. Escalator. Genericization sucks, suckas!
USB has become so ubiquitous, products using it don't need to advertise that fact - If something comes with a visible USB A or B connector on it, end users will just plug it in without giving a second thought about what logos the box had on it.
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?
Getting USB certification is like getting a pharmacist's license from a drug dealer. Perhaps it's improved somewhat (been a few years since I worked w/ it), but lots of stuff out there is/was certified but horribly non-compliant. Depending on what you were using it for, the biggest problem by far was getting your stuff to play nice w/ other stuff, even though your stuff is compliant, and the other "certified" stuff isn't. We used to have an entire lab setup just for testing that.
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.
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.
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.
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)