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Comment by zppx | Hacker News Reader

Two questions:

Is it royalty-free?

If the answer is negative, what are the licensing terms?

Thunderbolt technology leverages the native PCI Express and DisplayPort device drivers available in many operating systems today. This native software support means no extra software development is required to use a Thunderbolt technology enabled product.

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/325136-001US_...

Not enough. That's talking about support from developers, not whether hardware vendors need to pay for licensing to include this tech in their hardware.

That said, Mini DisplayPort is free of hardware licensing fees... so there's a good chance.

The poster of the question is a developer. I answered to help get the information he asked for, not have my answer graded on completeness or lack thereof with a curt "Not enough".

I think the "Not enough" was aimed at Intel, not you. But you seemed to have missed the point of the question.

No hardware developer in the consumer space charges developers to access their hardware. Spec owners frequently do charge other companies to implement their specs, though.

Intel has a mixed record on this - some specs - like USB - they have led but have been implementable licence free.

Other things they consider their propriety interfaces and have sued over - see the recent lawsuits between Intel & Nvidia over their memory bus.

So it is very reasonable to wonder if Nvidia and AMD are going to be able to implement this freely, or are they going to have to pay a tax to Intel. As far as I can see your answer doesn't address that question at all.

Yeah, sorry for the confusion. As nl says in the sister-post, that was Intel has released "not enough" info for us to know the full scope of licensing terms.

Has anybody read anything explaining how giving external devices DMA access is or isn't a problem? It seems one could make a Thunderbolt device that silently injects itself into the running system, writes itself to the hard drive, etc. without even touching the CPU.

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