In a blog posting, Harald Welte has announced that he has obtained permission for open hardware projects to use Openmoko's USB Product IDs and MAC addresses. Homebrew and community projects may contact Openmoko and request IDs and addresses for their own use.

According to Welte, registering an USB Vendor ID costs $2,000 and a block of MAC addresses $1,600 and both are therefore out of range for many community projects. Since Openmoko has not produced any hardware in quite some time, Welte has argued that it is better for these addresses and IDs to be available to the community than not being used at all and thanks Openmoko founder Sean Moss-Pultz for making them available.

The official registration for both the IDs and MAC addresses will remain with Openmoko, but projects are free to use them as they see fit as long as the devices they use them for qualify as open hardware or the software to run on them is open source. Interested projects can apply for either USB Product IDs or MAC addresses via email.

(fab)