Open-Source Hardware Hacking Effort 'Smacked Down' By USB Overlords [UK]

Cough up $$$$s like the big boys for your ID codes

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the organisation that oversees the USB standard, has apparently sent the director of a small British electronics firm away with a flea in his ear for daring to suggest how it could make the lives of open-source hardware developers easier and cheaper.

Arachnid Labs’ Nick Johnson decided that if the forum insisted every gadget that supports the universal bus must sport both a vendor ID number and a product ID number - an allocation for which the forum charges - he would seek partners to buy a vendor ID to share and use as a source of free product IDs for makers of open-source electronics.

A laudable notion, you might think. Not everyone who wants to build USB-equipped kit sells sufficient quantities to warrant the $5,000 the forum wants in exchange for a vendor ID, a recent rise from the $2,000 it used to charge. Devices supply their ID numbers to the connected computer so that they can be accurately identified and the correct drivers loaded, and so on.