Chaosradio 114: Software project management

Tomorrow I'll again be participating in Chaosradio. This months Chaosradio 114 issue is about software project management, both in the proprietary and FOSS world.

Ridiculous fees for USB Vendor ID

Sometimes you happen to find yourself starting a DIY electronics project, much like a Free Software project. And if that hardware is actually to be plugged into one of the standard interfaces such as the various PCI variants, or USB, then you'll need to give it a USB Vendor and Device ID. Vendor ID's are 16bit, and allocated by the USB Implementers Forum (IF).

Unfortunately, applying for a Vendor ID costs you USD 2,000. Yes, two-thousand bucks US for creating an entry in a table. This might be peanuts for large hardware companies, but it's an awfully large amount of money for any of the many USB hardware projects that people tend to experiment with. Especially since micro-controllers with embedded USB device controller are quite commonplace these days.

In the software / Internet world, there also are unique ID's that need to be applied for. I'm talking about protocol numbers, port numbers and the like. I've already applied for a number of them at bodies such as IANA. Obviously they are for free. This way you can ensure not to use values that get later assigned to other organizations/projects, and everything is clean.

Ridiculous fees such as the USB IF fee for a Vendor ID are just leading to the situation when independent developers will chose random ID's, which will sooner or later clash with other vendors and his devices.

If the USB IF was really interested in stability and unique assignments, they would

• reserve a couple of vendor ID's for experimental/ organization internal use
• create a hand full of vendor ID's which are not assigned to any vendor, but where hobbyists and Free Hardware developers can have individual device ID's assigned to themselves, e.g. like the IANA protocol/port number process works