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0 pointsMisterTea7y ago0 comments

> There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.

Reminds me of USB vs Firewire. Firewire was the superior of the two yet it lost. Why? USB didn't have Fw's $0.25 licensing fee per manufactured device.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

TomVDB7y ago· 1 in thread

$0.25 is very, very high.

I don't know who was supposed to pay the $0.25, but gizmos like external hard drives is a commodity market with razor thin gross margins.

Whoever decided that $0.25 was reasonable for that kind of market (Apple?) essentially killed the protocol right there.

Edit: here's the story: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/the-rise-and-fall-of...

Steve Jobs changed royalty model from a flat licensing fee to a $1 fee per port (insane!), Intel walked away and cancelled all FireWire development, Jobs lowered it then to $0.25 but Intel didn't come back.

Laforet7y ago

I remember PC and laptops equipped with a single fireware port well into the late 2000s even though peripherals are pretty much extinct by that time. Even Apple themselves appeared to have given up by removing them from newer ipods.

rwmj7y ago· 1 in thread

It's also about friction. You can download the RISC-V design straight off github (https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip) and start using it immediately. You don't have to phone up ARM or bring in lawyers to negotiate a license.

TomVDB7y ago

At least ARM smartened up on that one with the Cortex M0 and M3 DesignStart license, which requires no up front fee and you can just download the code for evaluation.

Probably still a good idea to have a lawyer read things over...

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