@drq The 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE-T standards are proprietary, as most (all?) IEEE standards are proprietary and not publicly released (you need to pay a huge sum of money to get access to IEEE standards and agree to not share the standards documents) - although the IEEE doesn't demand royalties, the standard documents have been republished in many places and there's enough information publicly available to implement both without having to look at the standard.

USB seems less bad, as it seems that the "USB alliance" makes its standard documents publicly available (under proprietary terms), plus there's enough information publicly available to implement USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 without having to look at the standard. The "USB alliance" seems to be focused on billing for compliance testing (in return for a usb logo), rather than royalties.


The HDMI forum are indeed assholes, as HDMI (1.0) is pretty much DVI with audio and data channels added, with royalties and extra-proprietarization. Later versions radically increases the clock rates and changes the protocols to push more image data, but even I'm amazed that they would insist on implementations being 100% proprietary, rather than being 90% proprietary.


DisplayPort used to be less proprietary, but now it's similarly proprietary to HDMI, although with a one off huge "forum joining" fee, without further royalties.

I'd like to note that dual link DVI is still good up to 1920x1200@60Hz