surprisingly it’s hard to find definitive info, but according to this wikepedia page you have to pay 5000$ to get a valid USB vendor ID to actually sell stuff with USBs in them, and you have to pay 3500$ to per two years! to just use the USB logo!
Sounds very FOSSn’t to me…
Also, here is the exchange that a few people who decided to basically get one entity approved for USB ID and for that organization to basically issue USB vendor IDs to all FOSS projects, had with the USB-IF, where USB-IF basically told them heck no
anyway, this is a huge revelation for me, I’ve always kind of assumed that such a ubiquitous protocol is totally FOSS, but turns out it probably isn’t… At least Intel open-sourced Thunderbolt, which always used mini-DisplayPort connectors, which are totally open-source, to it’s practically an open protocol and implementation, however Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C, which is apparently not open-source…
surprisingly it’s hard to find definitive info, but according to this wikepedia page you have to pay 5000$ to get a valid USB vendor ID to actually sell stuff with USBs in them, and you have to pay 3500$ to per two years! to just use the USB logo!
Sounds very FOSSn’t to me…
Also, here is the exchange that a few people who decided to basically get one entity approved for USB ID and for that organization to basically issue USB vendor IDs to all FOSS projects, had with the USB-IF, where USB-IF basically told them heck no
anyway, this is a huge revelation for me, I’ve always kind of assumed that such a ubiquitous protocol is totally FOSS, but turns out it probably isn’t… At least Intel open-sourced Thunderbolt, which always used mini-DisplayPort connectors, which are totally open-source, to it’s practically an open protocol and implementation, however Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C, which is apparently not open-source…
Yeah, it sucks, especially if the EU plans to feed that company against the will of consumers.