[systemvoltage]

Same with USB consortium. Gotta pay like $10k to get a USB vendor ID. What the fuck were these people thinking to rally up behind this draconian standard? There is a limit to how many vendors they can have, iirc 10k.

But for all the issues with it, usb seems to work on devices without Bluetooth-like issues.

Standards should be open and free for common public and only have to pay once you reach certain company size. Things like ISO standards aren’t free.

[jfim]

10k is a negligible amount for a device manufacturer.

You'd be surprised at how expensive it is to manufacture things. A plastic injection mold to make plastic parts can be in the five figures, for example.

[blibble]

vendor id is 16-bit so should be enough for 65535 of them

[systemvoltage]

Yea a bunch of these are reserved. I remember jumping through the whole process when we were designing a usb device.

To counter my own point, it takes money and people to run a standards committee and it is important to keep in mind that funding has to come from somewhere. Here are more details of what it takes to run one: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22968431/3908009

IMO they should either be funded by gov or by large companies.

[blibble]

yes, $4k/year doesn't seem that bad for a company that's going to be producing a commercial product

(and of course if you're just hacking locally you can do whatever you want as it's an open standard)

[madacol]

Maybe in next versions they should choose 256 bits (or 160, like bitcoin) which would be the hash of a public key, an any vendor that provides a valid signature, can claim that 160 bit vendor ID. No more need for a central authority

I'm probably overengineering it, just pointing out it is technically possible

[lttlrck]

There is no obvious reason why USB couldn't have used used Ethernet MAC vendor Id, aside from politics.

Instead there could be a single registry like IANA.

[lupire]

Can you sublet a vendor id, like a taxi medallion?