Your 'bugs and glitches' strawman is humorous because FTDIintentionally introduced bugs and glitches with the counterfeit devices, so they're certainly not trying to protect their reputation, just their profits.
FTDI's responsibility for supporting counterfeit devices ends a long way before tampering with them.
I think the moral high road to take in this situation would be to ignore the clones, but failing that, the approach which Prolific have taken (make the driver refuse to start on a known counterfeit device) seems a lot better than intentionally introducing bugs and not completely ludicrous like damaging the hardware.
Not to mention that FTDI's chips are not exactly known for their bug-free nature. If I had a dollar for every time I ran into a bug in their RS485 implementation, I would be a friggin' millionaire.
FTDI's responsibility for supporting counterfeit devices ends a long way before tampering with them.
I think the moral high road to take in this situation would be to ignore the clones, but failing that, the approach which Prolific have taken (make the driver refuse to start on a known counterfeit device) seems a lot better than intentionally introducing bugs and not completely ludicrous like damaging the hardware.