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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Why not just pick a VID and start using it? USB is so well understood at this point that there is no need for anyone to play ball with an "official" organization.

(Whoever gets "officially" issued that VID is going to whine when they notice it's already being used for hobbyist purposes anyway, which means that the technique of just picking one will guarantee uniqueness.)

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I like this idea. If there's some benefactor to the Open Source community (or even if they pass along a collection) for the VID, that could even work. They just need to properly implement the standard and the VID can effectively be the Hoover or Kleenex of VIDs.

Edit: On second thought (after I actually read it), this bit...

  Please immediately cease and desist raising funds to purchase a 
  unique USB VID for the purpose of transferring, reselling or 
  sublicensing PIDs and delete all references to the USB-IF, VIDs and 
  PIDs for transfer, resale or sublicense from your website and other 
  marketing materials.

...rubs me the wrong way on so many levels, I'm tempted to say, the hell with the forum.

That cease and desist request ticks the boxes for "You are committing a thought crime and are not permitted to have these ideas".

Which explains why we (especially) react so strongly to it.

An argument I would make if I we t to court fighting that is that such squatting dilutes the 'USB' brand.

Imagine a world where this 'open' approach gains market share. For the consumer, the net result easily could be that USB, which now is highly plug and play, becomes more like the way ISA cards used to be plug and play: you can plug in any device, but to make it work, you need to do some voodoo (oops, there's more than one device with that PID/VID. Please tell me what you plugged in: X, Y, Z, or something I haven't heard of?")

Exaggeration? Yes, but not completely untrue, and that's the argument I would make.

Whatever you do, you need some entity that prevents multiple manufacturers from using clashing identifiers. That is one of the things the owners of the standard will fight for to maintain, because it is one of the things required to make USB work as well as it does.

Yes, it would be nice if they sold individual VID/PID pairs to hobbyists. But I do not see a legal reason why they would have to do so. Anti-competitive? Maybe, but they will argue that there are thousands of individual vendors in the market.

> Imagine a world where this 'open' approach gains market share. For the consumer, the net result easily could be that USB, which now is highly plug and play, becomes more like the way ISA cards used to be plug and play: you can plug in any device, but to make it work, you need to do some voodoo (oops, there's more than one device with that PID/VID. Please tell me what you plugged in: X, Y, Z, or something I haven't heard of?")

For the record, this already is pretty common. Lots of keyboards mimic Apple's VID/PID, and tons of controllers use absolutely nonsense VIDs/PIDs (GameStop's mobile controller line, for example).

The fact that it's so important to prevent multiple manufacturers from using clashing IDs is exactly why it's in their interest to make registering an "official" ID as open and accessible as possible.

Read the article again. That's not the Forum, that's the VTM Group, which handles their marketing and legal concerns. The USB Implementers Forum itself didn't make a statement.

  This idea did not sit well with VTM Group, the people serving as the 
  management, PR, legal, and membership and licensing department of the 
  USB Implementers Forum

The hands, the mouth and collector of thoughts cannot be separated from a thing and still be called a whole. Besides even the title says, "USB Implementers Forum Says No to Open Source"

> The hands, the mouth and collector of thoughts cannot be separated from a thing and still be called a whole.

I don't know about that. Publishing houses are certainly separate from authors, and record labels from musicians.

The article is a second-hand source; the author could be trying to stir something up, or maybe just got a bit too excited. Who knows? The article also says the proposal, among others, "haven’t hit the desk of anyone at the USB Implementers Forum, the people who are actually in charge of designating USB VIDs and PIDs". Doesn't sound like the forum said no to me.

What is with this bizarre argument that paid legal representation doesn't legally represent their client? By definition, unless the USB Forum directs the VTM Group to retract the C&D, it represents the Forum's position.

As far as I can understand, as with every organization in the world, when the-entity-that-represents-the-marketing-and-legal-concerns of that organization writes a cease and desist, it kind of comes from that organization. The USB IF itself didn't make a statement because they don't make statements on these matters; that's why they hired VTM Group for.

Don't underestimate the USB Implementers Forum. Despite its name, it is not an organization of USB users (big and small). They have a direct interest in this matter because:

a) Like every organization, they need to have some source of income. Technically, they're a non-profit organization, but they're also the one who issue the VID, and a company giving out PIDs to whoever wants them is eating their "lack of profit".

b) Its members who have an interest in consumer devices/end products (i.e. companies that don't sell chips, but devices using chips) tend to be large and slow-moving. The Kickstarter crowd is pecking at their business options. (True story).

It's signed "Executive Director"; regardless of their internal organisation, it's a statement from USB-IF.

That's a ridiculous distinction. If you hire someone to represent you, you are responsible for their words and actions on your behalf.

"We will be willing to settle the matter with a trial by combat."

The way these things normally work is that you're only allowed to use the name and marks if you're an official licensee.

So if you put the USB logo on your marketing and claim to have a "USB Mini" connector in your specifications then you could be in trouble on two fronts: (1) the usb folks can sue you for using their IP and (2) purchasers can claim the product is not "as described" which may given them certain rights dependent upon the location.

Not using the official logo shouldn't be a problem in hobby market. Everyone will recognise the connector. Not being allowed to identify it as USB2 or USB3 or whatever, that could be a problem. I'm sure there are creative ways around it though.

One should be able to say "Compatible with USB2", in the similar way 3rd party companies made cartridges for the Nintendo.

And about squatting on a VID.. Well, they should have thought about pollution of their namespace on their anti-hobbiest policies. They frankly deserve it.

> One should be able to say "Compatible with USB2", in the similar way 3rd party companies made cartridges for the Nintendo.

The most prolific of those 3rd party companies was sued by Nintendo and lost.[1][2] Although that case is not directly applicable, and had different circumstances. I thought it was worth mentioning.

[1] http://digital-law-online.info/cases/24PQ2D1015.htm

[2] http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3146206

At this point, I doubt that certification matters for many applications, particularly in the consumer sector.

"Connects to your computer at speeds up to five gigabits per second using industry standard USB cable," probably covers everything short of a the edge cases such as government procurement contracts.

It doesn't matter at all for the hobbyist sector. If you can afford to push a paid-for consumer product, you can probably afford the license.

V-USB for AVR gives you 2 VID/PID pairs for 500 Euro. http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html

There's also a 10EUR hobby package which gives you a pair for personal use only.

FUP applies, but if you're breaking it then really you should go legit and pay the USB feds their protection money.

How are these guys getting round it?

Considering how many cheap Chinese knock-offs out there seem to go unpunished, I don't think the USB folks are really successful at enforcement.

Anecdote: apparently going after Chinese knock-off companies is a gigantic PITA. I've worked with those who have tried going after them. File a complaint about company ACBD. A week later, company ABCD never existed, but company XYZ is operating at the same factory. Amazing!

I can wholeheartedly confirm this. The cheap Chinese knock-off companies are basically beyond the reach of Western law.

Which could be said about so many such knockoffs; however, the issue of Chinese and other non-US counterfeiting is harder precisely because they're non-US, and operating in manners and areas where the legal system is not prone to caring about US regulations (for better or worse).

So whether you can safely ignore this depends largely on how easy it is for this body to successfully throw the book at you, and others' success in this area doesn't really mean anything unless you're able to operate in the same circumstances, which I doubt most of us are.

So... the FOSS hardware guys should operate Chinese manufacturing shell companies?

Let's just call it ThatThing2 and ThatThing3 in the hobby community :P

How about BSU? It could stand for a lot of things... but I like Bull Sh!t USB. Which I think is an appropriate eye-poke response to an annoying organization.

BHC - Butt-Head Connector

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/butt-head-astronomer.ht...

As far as I remember, only the logo is trademarked, not the phrase USB. So you could still state your product has USB, you just can't display the logo anywhere.

Then market it. SUSB - SuperUSB. Who wouldn't buy something that's the-same-but-Super?

"YouSB"

Aka Sue-Us-B :P

It's like if you want your CD to have the "compact disc- digital audio" label you have to comply with whatever colored book. People stopped caring about that long ago and won't care much for USB either as long as it works.

"[...] using a connector included on all modern computers".

Call it BSU2 and BSU3.

They have:

"There are a number of ideas to get around VTM Group that include squatting on USB VID 0xF055"

For those who missed it, 0xF055 can be read as "FOSS": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

Does anybody own these?

  0xDEAD
  0xBEEF
  0x1337
  0xFACE
  0xF00D
  0xABCD

...and so on?

Maybe, if they're reserved as unassignable (due to being an inappropriate value for professional, business puposes), then perhaps it's open season on those.

An alternative would be to find one that has been assigned to a now defunct company. Then you'd only have to worry about historical devices and if you are lucky you could come up with a list of those PIDs and exclude them.

I think 0xF055 has circulated too much now (slashdot, hack a day, maker: etc.) So if we there should be squatting it better be on 0xF055. Let's just destroy the strict minimum to achieve our goal (having a unique VID+PID for our proprietary drivers to find the corresponding gadget on the bus).

Looks like no: http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids

Though I'm not sure how accurate and complete this list is.

Edit the official list is here but they list their VIDs in dec.

Hah, nice VID, easy to remember.

You wouldn't even have to make use of the VID. If a sizeable group would just agree that "we're going to view this range as set aside for open source and start using it", no company would want to accept being assigned a VID in this range.

I think there's still a problem because that leaves still only 255 PID.

Maybe we should just squat the VID, and then do a PID+(another field in the descriptor) as the discriminator for people who need special protocols (I do).

For now I've stolen my MCU maker VID and used 255 as PID, because I couldn't even find an "experimental" PID/VID in the spec to use during development.

It's a bug and urgent problem, I'm perfectly ok to fudge the rules, but we have to agree on something that doesn't break people's drivers.

I know I saw 0xffff or something like that being used for development in some source code, but it turns out searching for "VID" is impossible because it gets interpreted as "video".

Try searching this:

  development usb "vid" -video

First hit is someone asking about VID/PID in a motherboard forum.

Search Tools > Verbatim

VIDs and PIDs are 16 bits, not 8.

oops, my bad! But I don't think it's enough to go random on that. We need either a registry or more bits to go random.

When I was doing some development for some USB devices, I remember there was a VID/PID designated for development-only use. I can't remember what it was, however, and the company I was doing work for registered their own before the devices shipped.

Or (as long as it's an opensource project), just go get a PID for your gadget under the openmoko vid, http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/USB_Product_IDs

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