I use lots of hobby stuff with USB ports. I have to lookup the vendor ID to make it read write in linux by default.
Presumably getting a proper ID makes this pain point go away from consumers somehow?
What's the gain I don't understand it?
Also, a lot of this could very well be trying to avoid the pain of the Bad Old Days of pre-plug and play DOS, where you had to manually set things like interrupts and I/O ports, and hope and pray that your new device didn't conflict with something important. For example, many an oldschool game had dire warnings about not running the sound card autodetect if you had things like scsi cards, because the conflicts were near inevitable and pretty catastrophic.
It will happen, that's a near certainty. Some day, somebody will think that's a good idea, and since it's easy, the scheme will get widely used.
Whether this is actually better probably depends on your point of view. But loading (somehow OS-neutral?) drivers from a fixed store on the device seems like a great way to be stuck with out-of-date binary blobs forever.
Moreover, in my current forey into USB, I discovered that kernel device drivers are completely unnecessary. And a google chrome API (or the underlying libusb) is completely good enough for proprietary devices.
[1]: http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/ [2]: http://www.hp.com/global/us/en/laserjet/hub/printer-installa...
Oh, come now. Any competently-designed USB penetrator will have your system owned seconds after you plug it in, with no further interaction from you. Running drivers from the device poses no additional risk beyond what you've already taken.
Using your own VID/PID allows you to write and distribute a driver that can be tied to your gadget rather than using a generic driver. Widely distributing products (even if they are "hobby stuff") that re-use the microcontroller's default VID/PID is also usually against the license agreement with the chip vendor and can lead to problems down the road.
The USB-IF can go fuck themselves either way. There is no place for them in this world, and I hope they disappear as soon as reasonably possible.