Follow-up On FireWire Licensing.
Tuesday, May 18, 1999
By Apple News Editor John H. Farr
>The IEEE 1394 (FireWire) patent-licensing group set up earlier this year by Apple, Compaq, Matsushita, Phillips, Sony, and Toshiba has been expanded, and one of the new members sticks out like a sore thumb!
A short EE Times article notes that Intel has now joined, along with Canon, Mitsubishi, STMicroelectronics, and Zayante, and that not surprisingly, the license royalty has been cut from $1 to 25 cents per system. Those of you with better memories will recall that earlier this year, Intel was refusing to join the patent pool and was in fact heavily promoting a new USB standard apparently intended as a substitute for FireWire. For all we know this effort is still going forward, but we note that when we wrote about this a few months ago, we mentioned speculation that Intel's USB hype may have been intended to pressure the patent-holders' group to lower the proposed licensing fees.<
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