Closed (ouch) or Open Hardware new Uno's ?

I didn't start out this way... but I'm actually beginning to share some of EH's concerns now.

Have I missed something here? Are Arduino saying that board-makers can NOT use the new Arduino vID/pID combination, and must have their own?

I suppose board-makers could always keep to the old FTDI-based design (since they've said the IDE will always support anything appearing on a serial port).