> This anti-consumer behavior on behalf of companies
I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly by releasing drivers that are tolerant of them or do not stop them from functioning. FTDI's products are the combination of their hardware with their drivers. Both are required in order to delivery functionality and reliability to meet their specifications.
Imagine your drivers are used in some sort of a critical application and a counterfeit device causes a failure that, in turn, causes harm to someone. An example might be a wired remote control for an industrial machine. It seems to met that bricking that device as soon as possible before harm is done is what we would want from a company that delivers a quality product.
Another way to put it is: Let the counterfeiters engineer a real product and be responsible for their own drivers, quality and safety.
The way to see clearly through some of these problems is to extend the definition towards extremes. Let's forget FTDI for a moment and generalize the problem to a microprocessor and a vendor-provided RTOS used to run the flight system of an airliner. This is a contrived hypothetical, forgive me for taking artistic license.
Imagine counterfeit processor make it into the supply chain. Should the avionics OS do its best to work with every possible fake or should it brick it on power-up before that potentially dangerous aircraft gets off the ground?
Another hypothetical could be one where we eliminate hardware completely. Imagine someone creates a fake Amazon, Facebook, NY Times or online brokerage site. Imagine proposing that the real companies would be anti-consumer if they created software that revealed the impostors. I could not imagine anyone who would propose they allow the fakes to continue to deceive consumers.
From my perspective this isn't anti-consumer at all. It's as pro-consumer as you can get: You work hard to ensure quality, consistency, performance and reliability.
The real anti-consumers are the counterfeit manufacturers. They, quite literally, could not care less. All they care about is tricking engineers and consumers into thinking they are designing and buying a quality product when, in reality, they might be dealing with dangerous junk.
I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly by releasing drivers that are tolerant of them or do not stop them from functioning. FTDI's products are the combination of their hardware with their drivers. Both are required in order to delivery functionality and reliability to meet their specifications.
Imagine your drivers are used in some sort of a critical application and a counterfeit device causes a failure that, in turn, causes harm to someone. An example might be a wired remote control for an industrial machine. It seems to met that bricking that device as soon as possible before harm is done is what we would want from a company that delivers a quality product.
Another way to put it is: Let the counterfeiters engineer a real product and be responsible for their own drivers, quality and safety.
The way to see clearly through some of these problems is to extend the definition towards extremes. Let's forget FTDI for a moment and generalize the problem to a microprocessor and a vendor-provided RTOS used to run the flight system of an airliner. This is a contrived hypothetical, forgive me for taking artistic license.
Imagine counterfeit processor make it into the supply chain. Should the avionics OS do its best to work with every possible fake or should it brick it on power-up before that potentially dangerous aircraft gets off the ground?
Another hypothetical could be one where we eliminate hardware completely. Imagine someone creates a fake Amazon, Facebook, NY Times or online brokerage site. Imagine proposing that the real companies would be anti-consumer if they created software that revealed the impostors. I could not imagine anyone who would propose they allow the fakes to continue to deceive consumers.
From my perspective this isn't anti-consumer at all. It's as pro-consumer as you can get: You work hard to ensure quality, consistency, performance and reliability.
The real anti-consumers are the counterfeit manufacturers. They, quite literally, could not care less. All they care about is tricking engineers and consumers into thinking they are designing and buying a quality product when, in reality, they might be dealing with dangerous junk.