USB Forum Becomes Too Greedy? (Score 5)

I am the Technical Marketing Engineer managing the USB web site. We had moved the Class Documents to the members only area, but have replaced them in the developers site. Sorry to have stirred up such commotion. This was definitely not calculated to shut down independent development.

That was the net/net of this situation so if you are concerned with getting at the information there is nothing further to worry about. If you are interested in the background, I will try to explain.

The USB-IF charter has always been to support the development of USB products. It has also always included the FOCUS on members and anything that was made available to the general public was fine as long as it didn't become a support or financial burden. This is based on the belief that USB technology is close enough to "rocket science" that most all individual companies will have trouble if they don't have support from the spec architects in the form of education, information centralization, market message commonality, a compliance program.... These things just ain't free. Ergo the membership organization does most of these things for its members and charges an annual membership fee to cover the cost.

USB-IF is a non profit corporation that spends over 20% of its budget on web information distribution, over %30 percent of its budget on a compliance program, slightly under %20 of its budget on administration. Whats left is now destined for on of the most often requested services from it's members, an improved compliance and logo program. The members feedback has been for a long time (this is an expensive change and it took a lot of effort to make it) that we should have a better way to stop the slipshod manufacturing and design of things that call themselves USB products. I don't know how this will work out, but we are doing our best to accomplish what the members are asking within our budget.

Now the place where this community can help!! As part of our compliance testing we verify product electrical characteristics and protocol capabilities. When it comes to the qualification of drivers and therefore the statement that a product works with a certain OS we only have one set of tests that we can use. They were developed and given to the IF for this use by the promotor companies (yes Microsoft is a promotor company). There were some big costs to develop these tests, by the way, that were covered by the promotor companies themselves. Currently for any other OS we have to simply take the peripheral vendors word for their drivers compliance to the OS. If the Linux community can find a way to judge driver quality for USB products the OS column for Linux on the USB-IF product list would mean much more. We are open to a proposal that would help seperate the functional products from the non functional.

PLEASE NOTE;Our compliance program is primarily a feedback tool to developers. We get more repeat attendees at workshops that come back even after their products have "passed" because the workshops allow them to learn so much and develop so much easier or quicker. As most of us heard in high school or college, "the score is not the goal of the test, it is the feedback on the learning that is of real value".

RSS