You mean how the driver tells the counterfeit apart? I don't really know. One possibility is that the counterfeit didn't copy some of the "don't care" cases exactly.

You completely missed the point. The driver cannot possibly know the difference between a chip falsely sold as being an FTDI chip, and one that is compatible without being mislabeled.

I got your point now. But then my comment was trying to point out that a "compatible chip" isn't really competing if its branding is deceitful. Whether it's possible for a driver to tell the difference between counterfeit and legitimate compatible chips isn't really relevant here.

Besides, any legitimate compatible chip vendor will need to have their own VID, which also means they need to develop their own compatible driver.

VIDs are not legally protected marks.

Unless there's a valid patent at issue (and nobody's mentioned a patent at all), there is nothing about the chips themselves that violates any law.

Defending vigilantism is disgusting enough when you have a colorable argument that the target of your act is the only one harmed, and is actually guilty of some sort of legal violation.

Here, however, you're defending vigilante destruction of the property of end-users who bought a product with a chip in it that, without the user's knowledge, may or may not have passed through the hands of someone who may or may not have labeled or described it deceptively.

The deceptive party may not even exist, and even if they do, they are not the victim of the vigilante justice. A user who may not have even heard of FTDI is the victim.

I agree that punishing the users of the product that contains the fake chip is a very bad idea.

Again, I'm merely trying to express my opinion that this way of making compatible chips is a very shady practice (and unlike that original comment I replied to was implying, typical market competition). Most users didn't choose the chip just because it's compatible and cheaper. They bought it thinking it's the legitimate FTDI chips with (very specific) guarantees from its manufacturer's datasheet.

> Most users didn't choose the chip just because it's compatible and cheaper. They bought it thinking it's the legitimate FTDI chips with (very specific) guarantees from its manufacturer's datasheet.

Eh....... Lots of people knew/know they are/were getting counterfeit chips. It's certainly shady, but if I were a chinese company making these, I'd simply not use the logo anymore and then sue the pants off FTDI.

Ohh, I agree. I meant that a lot of the makers kind of knew about it. I doubt anyone would spec it in a BOM.

From FTDI's point of view, their driver's are not free, they are distributed for use by FTDI customers. FTDI doesn't want their drivers to run on non-FTDI chips regardless of whether they are marketed as real FTDI chips or not.

Counterfeit isn't the issue here so much as competing non-FTDI chips relying on FTDI to do the hard and expensive work of developing drivers for them.

Bricking non-FTDI hardware was extreme and guaranteed to make people angry. I wonder what the reaction would be if FTDI had instead made the driver not work on non-FTDI chips unless the end customer bought a license key from FTDI to use their drivers.