Sonic: When will you know if the firewire PCI card is working?

About the masstorage support, I guess it would indeed be useful for now for some people. But it also seems that if/when USB2 support is released, the need will be lower. So I think it makes sense to focus on the other firewire parts to begin with.

Regarding firewire licensing issues, does anyone know anything more (Neko?)? It seems to me there should not be any problems as this works with linux.. and I doubt they are paying anything. So presumably the only licensing costs are paid by hardware makers. But we'd better be sure about this.