I emailed Ben Collins, the actual firewire Linux driver repository keeper, and here's the text of that mail..

Begin Quoted mail

"On Sun, 2008-02-03 at 15:52 -0800, Tronguy wrote:
> > Hi there
> >
> > I am writing to you as an explorer. Myself and others are interested in
> > the possibility of getting a working firewire stack going on the
> > alternative operating system MorphOS. Strangely, the core developer
> > team doesn't seem to be too hyped on this, because they say it is
> > necessary to pay Apple a large sum of money to get the rights to make
> > firewire work on another OS.
> >
> > Is this true? Was there ever any Apple involvement in the Linux
> > firewire drivers, through a grant, documentation, or otherwise? Perhaps
> > some company that needed firewire to work on Linux gave Apple some money
> > for the NDK to make this happen?

It's entirely untrue. The only thing Apple gets money for is hardware
that has firewire ports on them. Implementing the IEEE-1394 spec doesn't
cost anything (however, the documentation from IEEE obviously costs
money to get). " end of quote

and even most of the documentation can be had for free if you know where to look. Apple gets money presumably from chipset vendors, as you can go out and buy firewire cards separate and it would be impracticable for Apple to try and bill every single x86 or other mobo maker in the world who stuck a firewire port on their board.

Maybe we should all just pay Sonic the billion dollars instead