Oh, I know all that.....but the protocols are STANDARDIZED so you and I
and
everyone else on the net can use them without paying someone more for
their
proprietary "box".

The Internet != Ethernet. What gets routed between PCs and webservers is
not necessarily the same stuff that might be present on a device-to-device
subnet. There's all manner of ways to shuffle data across an ethernet wire,
only two of which are commonly used on "The Internet". IPX, AppleTalk,
DecNet are but a few. And a switch may well have to be aware of the
protocol in order to properly handle the packets.

This proprietary bull**** is what burns my ass. Boaters are wasting
millions trying to get data out of A's crapware so they can see it on B's
crapware.

So true. I liken it to making the customers swim out to an island and then
chumming the waters to keep them from leaving once they discover how crappy
the accomodations turned out to be. More and more these days customers are
getting wise to that sort of tactic and are refusing to go along with it.

NMEA's *******ization just makes another obstacle.

True, but a lot of that '*******ization' is to implement what a basic
protocol does not provide. In the case of NMEA 0813 devices it appears to
be a mix of going beyond the spec and half-assing it. One might hope NMEA
2000 will have less of this foolishness.

Of course, like always, it's about the money....

Or about making sure your devices work in an expected fashion. Trying to do
what customers want when the underlying spec doesn't handle it often means
going beyond the spec. They're not *always* out to screw the customers, it
just seems that way when hindsight is involved.

-Bill Kearney