I also think it would be mean spirited, albeit somewhat consistent with their current stance of not giving any open source hardware projects a break on the $5K

I also think it would be mean spirited, albeit somewhat consistent with their current stance of not giving any open source hardware projects a break on the $5K VendorID registration & assignment fee[1]. [1] http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/ http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/ EDIT: Fortunately, other organizations have done something similar, such as OpenMoko[2], without incurring USB-IF's wrath. [2] http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/USB_Product_IDs http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/USB_Product_IDs