At least Firewire or IEEE 1394 is an open standard and not subject to royalty fees. But to become the industry standard is yet to be seen, I personally would rather see ethernet become the standard, because then we can truly network our entire stereo and computer systems together, much like Onkyo and a few others are beginning to do. Although you can do that with firewire to some degree, Ethernet would allow true networking potential, web enabled receivers etc, and with Cat6 1 gb/s data throughput.
