It is time we get a meme with Richard Stallman saying “I told you so”.
That breaking a license and using software with hardware it wasn't ever intended to be used with might produce undefined behaviour?
Don't get me wrong: It would be great if we had an open source FTDI driver. But putting the blame on FTDI for all the people effectively pirating their software isn't the way to go.
If you are a stern supporter of Free/open source licenses you also need to accept other peoples' rights to license their work as they think is right. Because without a strong licensing framework GPL & co. don't work either.
How can I, as consumer, be absolutely positive that that the "FTDI" chip in my device is genuine? I'll go ahead and answer that. I can't. Anyone who works in the electronics industry knows this. When everything is made in china, it's very hard to be sure that fakes don't end up where they shouldn't belong.
Why do I bring this up? Because, last time they pulled this crap, reputable brand's products were damaged. Somehow some fakes ended up in their supply and those customers got screwed.
OK, so sure, we can fix the supply chain, add expensive testing to the manufacturing process, buy direct from manufacturer, etc... or hey, I got a better idea. Let's just not buy FTDI any longer. That sounds much cheaper and less painful.
In countries that respect IP this isn't a problem. The larger issue is China, Taiwan, etc don't respect IP and hard tactics like the FTDI driver bricking becomes a reality. No one wants to talk about the elephant in the room: Asian manufacturer corruption and lack of accountability with IP issues in those countries.
Lets get one thing straight here. Multiple people/management in the supply chain here know these things are fake. They aren't stupid. They know that a no-name manufacturer who suddenly undercuts everyone else and uses FTDI's driver is a counterfeit. They chose this knowingly to save cost and said 'fuck all' to any issues later down the line.
>Let's just not buy FTDI any longer.
Dell didn't need to buy FTDI to have the nightmarish capacitor plague issue. FTDI didn't make all the toxic dogfood that killed all those US dogs in 2007. FTDI had nothing to do with putting melamine in infant formula. Again, you're ignoring the real issues of how China and Taiwan and other governments do a "wink, wink, nod, nod" when its comes to IP issues and encourage and even protect counterfeiters for the sake of economic output and underselling those who respect IP.
Oh well, here comes the downvotes because on HN you can't criticize China, only Western nations.
edit: to the person who thinks the capacitor issue was just a 'QA issue.' It was corporate espionage against Japan from China to get around IP issues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Industrial_es...
Wait what? The real issue is that manufacturers can push broken drivers (kernel-mode code!), with seemingly no oversight, to users who no longer have an option to opt out.
I don't disagree with you, but you can't ignore the realities of the world. One of those is that almost all electronics are made in these regions (fake and genuine). This is why supply chain control is very difficult in these places. Additionally, supply chain control is not my problem to solve. It's the vendor's (FTDI).
> Dell didn't need to buy FTDI to have the nightmarish capacitor plague issue.
None of those issues were created intentionally by a reputable company. Dell didn't intentionally start building bad caps. It was due to a QA process gap at a fairly reputable capacitor manufacturer. It was a mistake... In this case, FTDI is doing this on purpose. It's totally reasonable to blame FTDI for a problem they created.
I don't see that as a "QA process gap".
In this case, there is no way to test for this as ftdi doesn't provide any way to do so. They simply break stuff after the fact. The only way to prevent this from happening is to not use ftdi branded parts.
Please don't. The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to go on about downvotes, and the on-HN-my-opinion-is-oppressed line is tiresome.
Doesn't the Somehow some fakes point to those brands not entirely deserving a reputation for not shipping fakes? I get that an isolated incident is different than not caring at all, but fake chips ending up in their products is a demonstration that they are not fully preventing it.
Whether consumers are interested in paying for products that they can be sure do not contain counterfeits is a different question than whether a given company shipped counterfeits or not.
or hey, I got a better idea. Let's just not buy FTDI any longer. That sounds much cheaper and less painful.
If you want to trade on your reputation and a manufacturer makes it impossible to verify their parts, don't use that manufacturer.
I think differing ideas of 'reputable brand' may be the problem, you can't just want to be a reputable brand and go through some motions of providing quality, you have to walk the freaking walk.
The cost for a company to use those chips are too great now. And that result is purely FTDI's response.
They could have taken other avenues: Windows Syslog, GUI messages, warnings. Instead they chose to do a path that we plebes would have been arrested and charged with the CFAA for doing (vandalizing hardware over a network).
Logically, the proper thing to do would be to develop a counterfeit detector and distribute it to all reputable intermediaries in the supply chain between them and the customers. That way, distributors could test the chips before accepting a shipment, and before paying for knockoffs.
Instead, FTDI gave the tester to end-users, all the way down at the other end of the supply chain. Many of these people will not even know what a FTDI is. And the tester actually works by making all detected counterfeit chips non-functional, which basically means someone ordered a package and it blew up in their face after they already paid for it.
The responsibility for protecting and enforcement of trademarks rests entirely upon the owner of the mark, not upon the customer.
Well, you can't. But that's just a side effect of the clones working with FTDI's drivers for so long. Now, when the clones stop working, your distributor won't be able to sell you counterfeit chips anymore.
>Let's just not buy FTDI any longer.
That or let your distributor know (wallet, lawyers, whatever) that you want the original FTDI chips you paid for and not knock offs.
In any case this creates new opportunities on the market. FTDI had/has a quasi monopoly on those chips. When this end this might be painful in the short run but we could get so more competition into the market.
That's the booby prize. It's too late. You've shipped product containing chips that the FTDI driver bricks or disables, and (a) you are screwed, and (b) your customers are screwed.
Meanwhile FTDI is chastising you for buying counterfeit chips.
Logical response: To heck with the whole mess. Buy someone else's chips.
This was not well thought out.
The problem today isn't just "undefined behavior". It could have been a problem yes, but FTDI defined this behavior quite specifically. The problem is they defined it with an in-band licensing message instead of out-of-band.
Imagine if you were using Microsoft Outlook for email (hey, we're corporate here, cut us some slack) and the Outlook client determined that your Windows installation wasn't Genuine and it decided that the proper recourse was to replace the body of all your outgoing emails with a message saying "NON GENUINE WINDOWS(TM) FOUND".
Would that sort of design be (a) insane, or (b) insane?
There is a free-software FTDI driver[1]. What this driver doesn't do, is to destroy or send random data to a chip it doesn't recognize as original.
[1] http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...
We do have an open source FTDI driver, and it works perfectly with both the real thing and with clones.