Slashdot Mirror
Apple to charge Licensing Fees for FireWire
David Jao writes
"According to this news.com story, Apple computer
has begun charging a $1 license fee for every FireWire port
that is manufactured. This means an extra $1 is charged for
every port in the back of a computer, every port on a
device, and every link in a device chain." This article
talks about how this is probably not such a hot idea on
Apple's part. Royalties on a technology that still isn't
really accepted yet?
I personally dont mind the $1 thing, they gotta
make money somehow, but unfortunately they just
killed Firewire. Thanks Apple.
dammit, this sucks. i was looking forward to getting one of those firewire cards, but now that they've raised the price a dollar i just can't afford it anymore.
If they can't make their products accessable to people with limited resources, i'm just going to take my business elsewhere.
Keep in mind guys, if it were Microsoft that invented Firewire, and they _didn't_ charge for it, people would be all over their ass about unfair competition and driving other people out of the market. Charging for your product is kind of the point. Open Source is great, and I love it, but I don't subscribe to the point of view that it's a moral imperative.
I know this much.
If the OEM is being charged $1 for something, there *IS* a mark-up.
So, it becomes a higher price at the consumer level.
(Is it 'right' for Apple to charge, hell yes. Will this hurt adoption? Hell yes.)
And, didn't HP have a part in Firewire? What about going to HP?
$1 is not really a big deal, but I think 1/10th of it is a more reasonable price point given the massive market ahead. Besides, lowing the price point to that will not virtually no effect on consumer product pricing.
/.er, I have more than 1 system ==> pay ~$50 to Apple)
Let say a particular computer plus all the equipment will have 10 firewire port, so I have to paid $10 to Apple. It doesn't look good, on the other hand, they did developed some good product, maybe I will paid $1 to $2 bucks everytime I upgrade my systems (like most of the
Someone else mentioned that this is just for the name "FireWire", and not for the actual technology. I find this rather hard to believe. Why would *anyone* pay for just the name. Granted, it's catchy. But I think it would be pretty easy to get "IEEE 1394" recognized as a synonym if everyone did it.
Omigod - I've just noticed: SlashDot has advertising - what a bunch of stinking capitalists.
We've got to boycott them.
Down With Market Based Economies !
Can I make a request that from now on all posters have to state their age ? Really there's no point
in fretting about these daft anti-market postings if they are actually being posted by spotty youths
who have never had a job.
-Simon (30 years old, writes software to feed his wife and child)
At least they aren't trying to charge for NOT including Firewire ports.
Didn't M$ try to charge resellers a fee for not including Winblowz?
refocus all that hostility, lovers of free information! apple is doing what all good capitalistic companies should be doing: seeking to make an honest buck off their good ideas. the problem, of course, is standardizing on patented technologies.
ieee has already standardized firewire (it's #1394 if i recall correctly), so once again we lose: lack of open source and free information representation on standards boards bites us in the ass. as long as we aren't represented there, firewire and mp3 and other patented standards, paired with legal issues like crypto exports, are the only thing presenting a serious threat to open source/free information.
that's where to fight. how do we muster the troops now?
Besides this $1 thing, I hadn't heard anything bad about Firewire. In fact, Firewire might as well be our future. Charging an extra $1 for something great is not asking for a lot. With the ports, harddrive ports, cdrom drives, etc add up, it will probably cost you no more than $20 (including markup from OEM) more than if your system doesn't equip with Firewire. $20 for faster overall performance is worth it.
There is a fee for DOLBY and WHY NOT !!!!
Of course they should charge for Firewire !!!!
What's wrong with you people ?
When they came for the Gypsys, I didn't care, because I wasn't one.
When they came for the Jews, I didn't stop them, because I wasn't one of those.
But when they came for me, there was no one left to protect me.
They charge a dollar now, but what about later?
This shows that Apple is the one in charge of Firewire, and the last thing an OEM would like it to have another comapny telling them to pay the price or they don't get something everyone wants. If Firewire becomes a standard to have in every computer, then Apple will jack the price up, just to get more money. Maybe two dollars, but all of you will not care. So that four dollars extra per device to still allow daisy-chaining. But what if they go to five, or ten. If modems get moved to Firewire, or anyother small and inexpensive device, then the modem costs about $50, tbut the licencing fees will cause it to go to $60 or $70. This is not just a one time charge either. It's for every device you wish to use that has a firewire port. If moniors, printers, zip drives, modems, speakers, hard drives, scanners, and other devices get put onto firewire as the standard, that could amount to $20 of the computer at the current price (assuming 2 plugs per device to allow daisy-chainging). What happens when Apple relized they could double their profits by charging $2, then $4? Many of you people who brush off one dollor as puny are not thinking that your computer could at some point cost $100 more because of the number of devices that have been pur on firewire and future cost increases. But, rememeber, the licencing costs of The MicroChannel caused the invention of PCI.
IBM f'd up Microchannel (which DID have technical advancements). Obviously, Apple is seeking to REAM themselves the same way IBM did...
Imagine a conversation 5 years from now...
"Is that... a FIREWIRE port??? I've never seen one of those - after all, USB became the standard because it was free..."
I'm so self righteous because I use Linux and I believe everything should be free and hate paying for things that other people invented. Fucking quit complaining already. If it weren't for capitalism, you guys wouldn't have cool gadgets. Psuedo-socialist crap, enough already.
C|net is owned in part by Intel. Of course they are going to put a negative spin on this move. They do not want Apple earning $2-4 on every Wintel PC for a technology that consumers will demand*. Intel wants to drive the cost of low end PC's down so that they can control the market with the cost of the chips (why else would they create the celeron[Yugo], Pentium II[Honda], Xeon[Mercedes] brandings?). They don't want competition in their precariously balanced marketing ploy.
Apple deserves credit where credit is due.
*For those of you that have never actually seen Firewire in action, make no mistake -- it is the "next big thing".
I'm surprised at the number of Mac fanatics jumping all over everyone on this thread. You need to realize that many people here are not _morally_ opposed to Apple charging money (although certainly licnsing fees for open standards is a questionable practice), but saddened that this will hurt adoption of FireWire.
Now, you might think an extra dollar of costs is not going to make a significant difference, but you'd be wrong. Profit margins in the computer and consumer electronics industries are paper thin. An extra couple of dollars o cost per unit at the manufaccturer's end, and you end up having to jack up the reatail price to non-competitive levels, or you won't have a profitable product at all.
I work for an EDA company so I know this dynamic - EEs spend quite a bit of the design cycle figuring out how to implement a design with fewer and cheaper parts.
So Apple has just given FireWire a major boot to the head.
However, I read elsewhere on this thread that Apple is only charging for the name, in which case they have only killed the name and not the standard.
Personally, I'd be happier to see FireWire go down in favor of SCSI (which will have higher throughput for years to come at least).
Sure $1 looks cheap now.
What's to stop them deciding that $50 or $100 is a more realistic license price after the stuff has been hardwired into every new motherboard and disc drive on earth?
Have a little foresight people?!
Licenseing fees kill new innovation? Well, Sony gets $$ for every CD player/CDROM made. Hmmm, better invest in vinyl record players for my computer. And to get Firewire approved by IEEE as one of their standards Apple had to agree to make licenses free or reasonably cheap -- and no its not Apple who determines whats reasonable.
Did you want any cheese with your whine?
I think I'm starting to understand Jobs. My guess is he's making the fee high, gets press, upsets some people, and then lowers the fee, gets press again, and a revenue stream, and people feel ok about the new fee.
I'm starting to get the impression that the people on /. are either a bunch of Communists or Welfare losers! It cost Apple big $$$ to develope firewire, why shouldn't they charge a licensing fee? Have you ever considered that a lot of other technologies require licensing fees? Display PostScript comes to mind as a technology that requires a licensing fee.
Grow up people.
um, why would I even buy a PC with windows on it?
Do people understand that $1 is a trivial royalty in the industry? My company pays 1% of the product cost for several different patents that we have ot license... and our product sells for $50K, that means we're paying $500 to several different companies. $1 is VERY fair considering the amount of energy and effort in designing technology.
It's amazing how so many people don't want ANYONE to make money... do you think this stuff gets built for free? Silicon ain't free.
Once again the message from Apple is loud and clear: Adopt our technology, support our standards, license our products; and we will own you, we'll rule you, and in the end we'll fuck you, so kiss my iCEO ass.
IBM receives royalties from every Token Ring
port sold. See what happened to this technology
however superior it might be in the begining.
My lab is wired with Gigabit Ethernet, not
Gigabit Token Ring.
MCA is a good example, but Token Ring approximates
FireWire better in my opinion. MCA died quickly,
Token Ring agonizes for so many years. I bet
FireWire will be kept afloat by all those
Japanese digital camera makers unless they
start to include an Ethernet port.
--P
It seems silly to bitch and complain about this. FireWire is a very nice technology, and basically has no competition. There is NOBODY else pushing a serial interface that provides 400 mbps.
Apple has doubtless sunk a great deal of money into developing FireWire. Do you think they should let all the PC cloners have FireWire for free?
Supposedly, FireWire is already on over 3 *million* camcorders, and will probably become quite pervasive as a storage connectivity solution.
$1/port ain't unreasonable, when you're talking about > $300 hard disks and > $1500 computers.
Well, so much for my job. It'll be gone soon, because I'm in one of those small companies that will be hit so hard. (I'm AC so I have a little chance of holding on....)
I'm an IEEE-1394 specialist, and since Apple just killed the entire field, I guess I'll just have to start learning something else.
This is a very serious issue, for many reasons.
1) Analysts predict that, to become competitive, the cost to manufacturers for IEEE-1394 must be kept under $1 per port. Pretty hard to do now, eh?
2) This is practically an infinite increase in the licensing fees. The typical previous license fee was $5000 flat, and companies might produce millions of ports for that.
3) Do you think that everybody else will keep their license fees down? Apple has more patents than anybody else, but there are a whole slew of patents for 1394 out there. SGS-Thompson, IBM, TI, Xerox, etc. They'll all want a piece of the pie.
4) As an example of competing technologies, PCI has NO licensing fees. Nada. Zero.
5) There are typically 3 ports per IEEE-1394 device. At $3 for Apple and $3 for everybody else, that's $25 for the consumer. Would you pay $25 extra for a 1394 hard drive over the cost of a SCSI drive (or $50 more than IDE)? I didn't think so.
Adios, I'm out of here. Be sure to shed a few tears for me on the way out.
Thanks,
AC soon to log back in as my real name, because it really won't matter anymore.
The Apple patents are useless anyways.
The only neat thing about 1394, the data/strobe encoding, is an SGS-Thompson patent.
Apple owns the patents on:
The isochronous data delivery method: a good design, but not something half the engineers in the world couldn't come up with.
the connector: they got a patent for the connector???????
the isolation barrier: which sucks. the TI method works a lot better.
the cable environment signal interface: trivial
automatic configuration: as if this hasn't been done before.
environment arbitration: standard peer-to-peer stuff
power management: again, been done before, and better
speed encoding: this one is a really bad design. It adds an analog design portion onto a totally digital interface.
And they want $3 per device? Hello?
The only reason IEEE-1394 is like it is, is that people decided it was easier to use the Apple proposal rather than reinvent the wheel. If they would have known it would have cost $3 per device, they never would have ratified it.
Friggin morons.
I'm not talking about making everybody give everything away for free.
I'm talking about making up arbitrary laws to make information technology look like a _limited_ supply, material good that can be sold and resold.
Most people like you fail to make the distiction between a limited good, and a public good. Our entire economy is based on the thousands-of-year-old-premise that there is a limited amount of goods avaliable to a much larger population. The mechanism by which WE happen to attempt to distribute it "fairly" is called capitalism.
In the case of information (e.g. software, IP, standards specification, etc.) its not so clear. Its not a limited good. We make up stupid laws to make it LOOK like a limited supply, but its not. Per copy, information has zero production cost, and the cost to the person who "gives up a copy" of his information to another is also zero.
There is still plenty of money to be made in making actual products, providing valuable services, etc. Take your "but I'll be broke and nobody will write software, or develop standards, or compose music, or make art, or write books if we don't get paid" bleatings elsewhere.
Don't think for a moment that supporting IP or moronic licensing fees fix ANYTHING. Sooner or later, our information capabilities will make any public good that is sold for money instantly worthless. Why? Because the competitor's product costs NOTHING.
I just hope those of you who depend on our court system for your licensing fee (read: government handout) have found more creative ways of making a living.
What am i saying?
For those of you not paying attention:
Patents, Intellectual Property, and Copyrights amount to nothing but welfare. Now who's the pinko communist/socialist?
This pathetic state of things is due for a major collapse.
Oh yah. the topic. I almost forgot.
People have said it before. $1 is not alot. But compare:
PCI
Microchannel
EISA
Which one is alive and well today, and why?
If an alternative to FireWire comes out that is cheaper, better, faster, guess what?
People bitched about how much better MCA was than ISA. It just took time. Personally, I don't give a RATS ass about a piddling $1. But the fact that Apple is holding fast in its will to continue license restrictions is yet another sign of how adept Apple is at shooting themselves in the foot.
Apple spent a LOT of money developing Fire Wire and they deserve to make some $$$ off of it. You'd better beleive that everybody else licences their technology.
Grow up......
:-)
Great, wonderful, awesome!
and apple wonders why they dont control the market.
They just signed the death warrent for firewire.
I'm very happy they want to kill it.
I'm glad apple is still stupid
Long live the Pc platform
what is apple THINKING?? that's NOT how you're supposed to do it! if you have a new technology nobody uses, you're supposed to give it away free! then you wait until everyone uses it and it controls the market. THAT's when you slap on the bigass liscensing fees.
hey, look where it got MS..
why is it that most "successfull" tech business
people are assholes?
> -Simon (30 years old, writes software to feed his wife and child)
You'd better run for another job. Consumer software development is doomed.
Anonymous Coward (30 years old, refuses to buy software)
I don't think Apple's licensing fee should be
an issue. However, $1 a port is a bit steep if
there is no cap and no flat fee option. It would
end up adding to too much revenue. If Apple was only
charging a flat $5000 before, that was probably too low
if you consider all the R&D investment that went
into the development of FireWire.
now what is really obnoxious is intel's buying a stake
in RamBus and declaring it the standard for memory and forcing the industry to pay huge amounts per year to RamBus.
Oh, Apple is SO evil aren't they. They just killed Firewire because they're so greedy...
Give me a fucking break. Why does everyone want everything for free? You Linux idiots have gotten it into your brain that you're entitled to everything for free, and whoa to you if you try charging anyone a fee!!!
Do you all work for free? Do you go to work (those of you who DO work that is, and not living off Mommy and Daddy at college) and refuse to pick up a paycheck? Why not! Everything you do should be for the world! How dare you pick up a paycheck for programming! How greedy!
Apple spent a TON of cash developing something cool, which is Firewire...and now that they want to make a little of that back everyone jumps all over them. How does this promote any R&D?
What if everyone caves in to people like this? I doubt there would be much more R&D. It would go something like this: "Gee, we have a great idea for a new hardware product, but it will take quite a bit of money to develop it, and if we try to sell it or make any money off of it, the Linux weinys will be all over us...so I guess we just shouldn't do anything....".
Apple is a corporation folks. It answers to stockholders and boards of directors and things like that. They're in business to make money...not to just spend millions and develop stuff and then give it away for free.
Unless you program for free, except NO money for ANYTHING you do...you have no room to talk. If you have a job at all, then the same argument could be used for you!
How DARE you charge money for your services! You WHORE!
Hypocrites...
Microchannel had some good ideas too. But IBM wanted a dollar or two for every Microchannel board made. Guess what; nobody made any and the technology died.
\\'
Heck, it's about time the PC camp began coughing up a little remuneration to Apple for all the technological innovations that were taken from them. I'm in the PC camp though not in the Microsoft division.
:)
What's a buck anyway? I'll tell ya... a lousy cup of coffee.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Posted by jonrx:
Well, FireWire was a nice try, but then as usual greed has to spoil things...
-Jón
Posted by modefan:
if licensing fees like this are put onto newer technologies like firewire, then those technologies will never rise to do any good.
there could be other ways to make money other than killing off your only hope.
Posted by jonrx:
I'm just wandering...
The movie and record companies were going to use the introduction of FireWire as their opportunity to force in a "copy protection system". I saw their plans at the recent Consumer Electronics Show.
It would prevent any direct digital-to-digital copying of any digital media the copyright holder chooses. They'd start with DVDs and Pay-Per-View events, but of course it would not stop there. Eventually all Digital TV programs and all cable shows would have copy protection (so they can stop you from zapping the commercials) as would all music on the new formats like DVD-Audio.
Hollywood has a dream of turning your home stereo into a jukebox. Their plans include installing a "smart card" in your future TV set to ensure that you only can watch a program on a particular set and listen to music on a particular receiver.
This is not paranoia, this was on the wall at the "1394 Pavilion" in the Las Vegas Convention Center last week. If it requires the sacrifice of something as cool as FireWire, so be it.
Posted by FreeGestalt:
... directly and indirectly.
I dragged myself through the brunt of the responses to this subject and could only be amazed at the number of people who take issue with a hardware vendor charging for something.
To wit. It costs tons of money to develop hardware and even the software protocols to run the hardware (hopefully turning it into a standard). Don't think it does? Well how do you possibly explain how the following gets funded and/or accomplished:
hardware design
software/firmware design
testing and validation
debugging
production tooling
production testing and quality control
production of the product
dissemination of the protocols/specs
marketing
packaging, distribution, tech support.
Now I'm not saying that the $1.00 fee doesn't have possible detrimental effects to the adoption of Firewire technology (I think it is too high). No, I am reminding everyone that it costs money to do things in the non-software world (software can/does cost money to develop too, but the sunk costs can be negligeable in comparison). A lot of money.
Information may not have a limited supply, but information technology does. That is why there are patents, copyrights, and the laws that enforce them. Standards and the technology they support don't just appear overnight or because a group of well-meaning individuals got together and decided it was so. If you really think that PCI is around because someone/or corporation decided that it would be simply free, than you aren't thinking deep enough. Money is being made off of the standard
If Apple owned the manufacturing of IE 1394, which to my knowledge it doesn't, and simply included this $1.00 fee in the price of its port, would you all be whining? No. You wouldn't even know about it. Get the point?
Posted by FreeGestalt:
And if you want a really good additional information about this, read the posts in reply to "Principles of Open Standards".
_____________________
Is it really kosher to reply to your own post?
I like firewire. It sounds very nifty. I want to see it be the standard.
One doesn't have to dig very deep into the history of technological standards to see that cheap/mediocre/open standards win over expensive/excellent/closed standards every time.
That's why this scares me, and I think most of the other posters critical of this licensing scheme.
Fortunately, I don't see anything even close to firewire out there, so maybe it will succeed in spite of this...
apple paladins need to chill.
--
OG
Sony, Philips, IBM, and Texas Instruments have licenced Firewire from Apple for a one-time flat fee.
Dolby noise reduction is licensed, so why can't Apple license Firewire?
Is there something WRONG with making money off one's invention?
I mean - it's an OPEN standard right? IEEE 1394 is the standard. Isn't that the whole point of "openness" - allowing people to see the guts? I didn't think openness was about preventing companies from making money.
How in any way is this infringing on one's freedom?
Plenty of technologies have royalty fees associated with them from the outset that have not killed that technology.
There's a lot of demand for FireWire out there - it's already in major use in digital camcorders - AND - there doesn't seem to be an alternative technology yet. I'd say that makes this a good choice for Apple AND the industry: Apple gets the $$$ now - and if people aren't willing to pay, they'll make an alternative.
-Stu
That $1 /port cost of manufacturing is pure bullshit.
The arguments in favour of USB for low-bandwidth devices were that it only cost around 80 cents/port, whereas Firewire was about $5.
If you can find your "analysts report" and link it, I'll apologize and believe you.
-Stu
Those who've read my previous posts know that I'm a viscious Mac-defender. Well, for once I'm going to have to blast Apple. This is greedy lunacy, an attempt to control what weas supposed to be an open-standard. I find it completely repugnant, and once again I go back to my argument that Steve Jobs is an insane fool, albeit lucky enough that a few of his ideas, which usually look like the work of the proverbial million monkeys on a million typewriters, actually do occasionally turn out Hamlet or some other really good thing.
Fortunately, Apple won't succeed in this gesture. Why? Because Apple wasn't the only FireWire developer. Texas Instruments makes it too, and they don't do this. So if you want FireWire, get it from them.
"IEEE standards may include the known use of patent(s), including patent applications, if there is technical justification in the opinion of the standards-developing committee and provided the IEEE receives assurance from the patent holder that it will license applicants under reasonable terms and conditions for the purpose of implementing the standard. This assurance shall be provided without coercion and prior to approval of the standard (or reaffirmation when a patent becomes known after initial approval of the standard). This assurance shall be a letter that is in the form of either a) A general disclaimer to the effect that the patentee will not enforce any of its present or future patent(s) whose use would be required to implement the proposed IEEE standard against any person or entity using the patent(s) to comply with the standard or b) A statement that a license will be made available to all applicants without compensation or under reasonable rates, with reasonable terms and conditions that are demonstrably free of any unfair discrimination." from MacInTouch which also has several links to patent and other IEEE information. Maybe you sould get the bylaws chaged...
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
I do not object to charging money for a product. I object to charging money for a standard. Where would we be if all makers of IBM compatible PCs had to pay a license fee to IBM? What if IDE and SCSI were toll roads? What if VHS had required license fees?
The assertion that the fee is small is not adequate defense. Months back, the Open Group attempted to levy a "small" fee for X11R6.4. Even though the fee was small, people balked. The problem with a small fee is that it might not stay small.
For those of you with short memories, the VHS story is instructive. Back in the 80's, JVC invented the VHS standard and held numerous patents on it. Although JVC made money from VHS products, they did not charge anyone a single cent of licensing fees for the standard. Result: VHS trounced the competing (but closed) Beta standard, which everyone agrees is technically superior.
Restaurants don't buy Pepsi because Pepsi is made by the same company that owns competitors such as Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut. In the same vein, licensing fees for FireWire will discourage hardware vendors from popularizing it. It may be too early to say this, but I am already ready to chalk up FireWire as yet another good Apple technology killed by their short-sighted management.
Grow up, $1 is a bargain for what is a high-end port on a machine. Any idea how much IEEE 1394 controller chips cost? Much more than $1...
"Royalties on a technology that still isn't really accepted yet?"
Jobs said that FireWire is in every digital camcorder on the market. That sounds like "accepted" to me. If you want your peecee to talk to digital camcorders, and all major manufacturers do, then you put in FireWire. Period.
I've gotta wonder... what if Linux suddenly started costing a buck per install? Would we all go use Windoze or FreeBSD or something instead? I don't have anything that uses FireWire yet (except maybe the SGI's digital camera - I have no idea what it uses!) but if I had the need for it, I'd be a lot more concerned with value than price.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
These companies just can't leave well enough alone can they? Why must greed kill good ideas and innovation? I just don't get it.
Yes, but Intel is only an investor...C|Net runs on Suns.
Yeah, but we all know you'd pay anything to support your Mac habit TAK....just kidding.
If anyone bothers to read the article, they'd see that apple has been charging for firewire all along. Early adopters have been paying a 'flat fee'
rate since day one.
Who knows ? it is entirely possible that given the
low volume of firewire peripherals, the pro rated unit cost of the license agreement may be more than $1.
This may be CHEAPER than prior licensing arrangements.
It also lowers the 'entry cost' for intending firewire developers.
This is NOT a case of Apple saying
"here's something cool you can have for free" and then changing its mind.
Sony, Philips, IBM, and Texas Instruments all maintain licences to the technology in which they paid a flat fee for and will not be paying the $1 per/port fee. Apple is the first to announce and bring the technology into the consumer view and made it truley noticable, and they've called it FireWire. If the demand comes and I beleave it will people will want FireWire on their computers and in their consumer devices. Fact is this stuff is just to cool to let die and I beleave that's far from what it's going to do. Companies might not like the fact they have to pay $1 for every port they put into their products but I doubt it will keep them from doing it. Here's a great artical on the whole thing: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,3 0995,00.html
"The difference between genius and stupid is that genius has its limits." -- Unknown
Who cares? They can only license the name "FireWire", not the standard, IEEE 1394.
Adaptec has already raised this question. Do a search of "FireWire" on their site.
Sony also has another name for it, but for the life of me, it eludes me at the moment.
Hoopla.
Every time I touch a SCSI chain, I spend much more than a dollar's worth of time messing with ID's, termination, and "can we fit another brick on this darn power strip?"!!!
The only thing that could hurt Apple's FireWire play is not to sell it out. In a sense, FireWire is Appletalk on steroids:
Apple, much more than Sun, proved that "the network is the computer" by making sure that anyone with two+ Macs and cheap connectors had a network with almost NO setup. But Apple didn't sell that technology to the world, what might have happened if they did?
FireWire may tell us.
What consumers should be thinking is: The ultimate plug-and-play vehicle is worth two bucks.
The first ad might be: remember when you brought your Zip to a friend's house (to pirate software, maybe?) and you forgot the power brick? Well, for two bucks, that nightmare will never happen again!
Whatever. Apple has saved me enough time to have the luxury to participate in this rockfight.
Think of it this way...
Apple spent a lot of money to put this together,
so why shouldn't they recover these costs?
I mean, whats the point of innovating if it isn't
worthy your while in the end?
If all those hardware people are charging extra to add the "feature", why shouldn't apple get a piece of the action???
--ST
_____________________ This Space for rent.
Wow, comparing licensing fees with genocide. That's a first.
If hardware ends up costing too much people won't buy it. They'll stick with other standards or adopt cheaper ones. And, (get this!) no one will die. Pretty cool, huh?
OK, $1 isn't much, but that's not the point. Nobody wants to pay royalties to Apple just to have a FireWire port on their machine. We're just going to have to find a different way of getting the same transfer rates to/from our camcorders and such. There's no way I'm going to pay any money to Apple unless I decide to buy a Mac. Apple has once again lost its mind.
.-.--
MicroChannel.
Some think Apple may be trying to use its position as patent holder to gain a competitive edge in its core market of desktop and graphics publishing.
How could a technology patented by a corporation become an IEEE standard? What if someone had patented ethernet? How would networking be different? We'd probably be using a different MAC standard, one that had been developed to escape the patent restrictions.
I'm not against hardware patents, but I am against patenting technology that has been submitted and approved by a standards body. We've seen the damage Fraenhofer(sp?) has done to opening up the MP3 encoding process through their patents, and now we're watching the delay of the digital camcorder's acceptance to the market.
Perverse, Apple. I think your next IMac should come in a new flavor...rotten. I've been thinking of getting a G3 but now I won't get near your machines, no matter how nice the hardware is.
You can't kill a technology by charging extra for the connector. Esp. a good high speed technology like firewire, which already has corporate support(Kinda). If Microsoft charged an extra dollar for Windows98, would anybody care?
Amen!
Apple owns the patent on IEEE 1394 / Firewire technology. Name matters not.
Its one or two dollars now, but whats to stop them upping the cost in the future? I think Apple should have the cost tied to inflation (or something silmilar) to stop them charging 5, 10 or 50 dollars in the future.
As for it being just greedy capitalism, well thats just rubbish. Nobody here would be arguing if Apple didn't spend 7 years of R&D to produce FireWire. Obviously, everyone should vote Communist, but it doesn't mean a developer shouldn't reap some rewards. If they didn't, what would be the incentive? And how could the costs of development be returned? Some people on here are being a little naive.
Its obvious that Apple realizes that they will not be able to sell the most machines equipped with Firewire, let alone machines with the best support and most "compatible" peripheals.
So, seeing Ms and Intel attempts to use Firewire Apple just did the logical thing. If you can't make money off your invention with your own machines, let the other guy do it.
Still, it won't help establish the use of Firewire. Unless of course one of these big companies gets into a cross-agreement with them and makes machines without a per port cost.
. * Did aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
My concern about Apple trying to get licensing fee for FireWire/IEEE-1394 is that they will end up being like Sun, who is causing all kinds of headaches in regards to Java licensing.
This might just end up killing FireWire when other manufacturers favor future and cheaper developments of Fibre Channel, something that will be developed by a large consortium of companies.
WRONG. They haven't killed Firewire. It will be stock on all new G3's.
Yeah, but who is going to be making peripherals for that slot if it costs them $1 each?
I don't know how much that is in terms of costs of manufacturing, but I have to assume from the hubbub that it's not an inconsequential amount.
Jay (=
(Likes his Mac, gets annoyed with the manufacturer a lot -- I thought they were over these kinds of bonehead plays...)
If Microsoft charged an extra dollar for Windows98, would anybody care?
Apples and oranges.
For one, we're not talking about an series of pits in a CD (or a set of magnetic impulses on a hard drive platter) we're talking about an actual, consumable, marketable thing -- I still have no idea how they calculate "cost" of engineering software.
(Well, in MS's case it seems to be "whatever the market will bear, plus 10%".)
Second, you don't charge an additional dollar just because it costs you an additional dollar to make the damn thing. They'll just add it in the costs of production, and end up raising the price by $2 (or $5 or whatever to make it a round, marketable number).
Jay (=
But it ain't. And that's the point, re:
"if it were Microsoft that invented Firewire,"
--They didn't because they don't know or care shit about innovation--and HARDWARE innovation? MICROSOFT? Christ they swipe designs for MICE!
"and they _didn't_ charge for it, people would be all over their ass about unfair competition and
driving other people out of the market"
--Damn right people would be all over their ass--the company has twenty times the market share that Apple does and the equivalent market-power, and the ONLY reason that Microsoft "gives away" anything is to kill competition. Otherwise it overcharges--by comparison--for virtually every one of its products--from its OS(s) to "Office" software to joysticks.
True, $1 per port is peanuts--it's just that Apple's move, if it's true, doesn't exactly create a good impression of the company, and it may indeed be a bad sign--"My Apple," anyone?
I like Apple--their hardware (or the hardware they use) is terrific, they're software is decent to fantastic, and they've been pretty smart lately in the marketing area, but if they start turning into Microsoft--hey, fuck 'em.
They killed the Apple II series (their main source of income at the time) in favor of the Macintoy, rather than try to keep the Apple II up to date, they were shoved towards M$ to get badly-needed money to keep going, and now they're charging extra for a new technology.
The extra dollar isn't a big deal. It would be interesting to see how they think sometimes, though. Given their past history, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple killed Firewire outright; they like to milk things for money before slitting their own throat.
_______
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
This seems like just another redux in the technology industry. I personally don't think that $1 per port licensing fee is going to do any major damage, and in fact, this may be a very good thing over the long term.
Consider Adobe's attempt to control the use of Postscript. Not only is the language still the de facto standard for imaging, Adobe's selfishness resulted in MORE competition, as well as better and more affordable products. This happened because people (including Apple) got tired of paying Adobe's high licensing fees. Now we have TrueType as an alternate font technology, more affordable postscript-compatible printers, and VERY affordable access to the typefaces themselves. If Apple gets out of hand with its licensing fees, what will prevent some enterprising company from developing a product that is Firewire-compatible?
I'm fine with "1394", but I doubt Joe Consumer would be. The big thing that's going to prohibit consumer adoption is the confusion spread by ten different naming standards (and not the $1 toll).
Techie: "Just plug the iLink into the Firewire and then the Firewire into the DV-o-licious and that into the 1394. Plug and Play!!"
Consumer: "Wha? I think I'll just use USB."
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
All I want to say is that I think firewire is going to succeed. 1 dollar isn't much, even in the low margin PC enviroment. But i'll let the future do my talking thank you.
Although you open-source preachers and extremists (perhaps fundamentalists? This is becoming almost as bad as Christianity - next thing you know there will be an inquisition!) probably will loathe this move and flame Apple all the more, approach it from the perspective on the company:
You've spent millions of dollars on developing this ground breaking technology that could overthrow SCSI and IDE and serial ports and parrallel ports and even the recently standardized USB, and you've got to recoupe your investments. Are you going to give it away and sell support? Write a book on it? No, you're going to license it to recoupe the investment so you can afford to improve the technology and/or development new ones.
$1 a port is not bad at alls. I pay more in gov't taxes to put 3 gallons of gas in my van's tank than I would on a $20 or $50 or $1000 peripheral or even a $2000 computer. I'd rather my money go to computer technology than right-wing politicians.
- MaineCoon
MEOW!
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Hmmm. Let's see here: Compuserve introduces a graphic standard (GIF) and lets everyone use it for years; they then impose a $1-per-software-application license fee, arousing the ire of computer users and software developers worldwide by having the nerve to charge for something that was free all along.
;p
(incidentally, this event also dooms the GIF format and sees JPEG take over as the dominant compressed image format on the web)
And now we're upset because Apple is being up-front about their desire to recover R&D funds? Please. You can't have your cake and Edith, too.
--j
Over time Firewire could have dominated all other ports. Mass production would have brought down the price to that of USB ports, and considering that Firewire is faster, who would need USB or any other port. We would have the simplicity of one Firewire port for everything. But with the extra royalty fee, this will probally not be the case. And it will probally result in Intel comming out with Advanced USB in a few years.
BTW, does anyone know if Intel charges a royalty for USB?
So, Apple decides to revise it's license agreement for future agreements and everyone thinks it's the end of FireWire.
/. are Open Source advocates, would you be willing to give up 6-7 years of your life to develop a really cool technology, and then give it away? I don't mean spending a couple hours a night hacking at some code. I mean your full time job is working on this new cool technology. Most people would have a hard time doing this. Not that they wouldn't want to, it's just they couldn't. It's not economically feasable.
Wrong.
Apple has created some very cool technology. And, after seeing all of the demos, I am convinced that this will be the future of Video/Computer convergence.
Remember folks, this is a standard put forth to connect high-quality video devices that just happens to work really good for other devices too (hard drives, CDR, computers, etc). The people buying these devices are already paying a premium, the fee is probally not even raise an eyebrow.
Apple has been working on FireWire since before the first PowerPC machines came out. If I'm not mistaken, it's been at least a good 6-7 years. Now Apple is trying to earn back some of it's investment by licensing the technology on a port by port basis. And everyone thinks its the end of the world.
Let me ask you this... knowing the majority of
Now, look at it from Apple's point of view. They have spent millions of dollars developing FireWire. In this time, Apple almost went the way of Commodore and Atari. And they came back from the near dead. And FireWire was one of those core technologies that they didn't can. Considering what they had to go through, I think Apple deserves a buck.
dennis
news.com article talks about connecting digital camcorders via FireWire. Is it possible to do it via USB port?
please mail zlatko@mesopust.com
Welcome to Adriatic
If you folks don't think Firewire is an accepted technology now, give it a couple of months. Many, many companies have already licensed Firewire technology from Apple with a one-time fee. They don't owe Apple a cent more... and they are the major players in the industry right now. Already, companies like Compaq, Sony, JVC and several storage-device companies (Iomega included) are sporting devices with Firewire connectivity. And this is just the beginning. This has the potential to be a major source of income for Apple, and I say more power to 'em.
Someone earlier posted that Sony gets moolah for each CD-ROM that ships...
can anyone else cite any major components which have licensing fees? e.g. anything from intel? just curious.
-j
Let's be clear here (or pedantic): A standard is a technical whitepaper, describing how a piece of technology operates. A patent is a legal document that gives certain rights to the inventor. These are not mutually exclusive, nor should they be.
Where would we be if all makers of IBM compatible PCs had to pay a license fee to IBM? What if IDE and SCSI were toll roads? What if VHS had required license fees?
There are examples on both sides of the fence -- how about PostScript or PCI? If a new technology is head and shoulders above what's currently available (not just a speedbump), then it's not unreasonable to levy a surcharge and recoup your investment.
Now if the fee is too high then it'll stifle the market and nobody benefits, but I think $1 / port is reasonable.
The assertion that the fee is small is not adequate defense. Months back, the Open Group attempted to levy a "small" fee for X11R6.4.
I think most people balked because they were being charged for something that they weren't previously. If you levy a charge from day zero, everyone knows what they are in for.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
anybody here remember MicroChannel?
Although that initial GET A LIFE comment is more of a flame than a real comment, I have to say that I agree.
If Apple doesn't charge for this, then why would they go and spend millions in research on this cool stuff in the future? For the good of humanity? Please.
Now some people are saying "wait until Firewire becomes widespread, then charge." I'm sorry, I thought that was the exact evil thing we were blaming Microsoft for? You want them to have a patent over a basic, everyday technology, and then screw everyone by raising the price? Or would you rather they be honest about what they plan to do and change the price before everyone has standardized on the technology?
Apple spent money on this. They did the world a favor by inventing a damn cool technology. And they deserve to be paid for it. Period.