On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 08:48:56AM +0100, Jorge Pinto aka Casainho wrote:
> 2nd question: if we need to use USB, does we need to pay royalties for
> use it?

Yes and no. USB does not require royalties as such, but you do need a
vendorId/productId pair. The proper way of getting that is to get a
vendor id from the USB-IF, at a cost of $2000. Once you have a vendor id
you can allocate product ids yourself. (that price is just for the
vendor id. It doesn't give you the right to use the official USB logo)
See http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/ for details.

There have been (and probably still are) some people around the net who
bought a vendor id and resell individual product ids. This is against
the agreement they signed with the USB-IF however, which means they
usually don't stay in existence for long. I have no idea what steps the
USB-IF takes against people who have bought a product id from such
outfits, if any.

Frank

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan