[bsder]

> I knew exactly what he was talking about- not xenophobia, but legitimately shady software that is common to get from Chinese manufacturers, often from some equally dodgy ftp server or torrent seed.

This so much. Part of the reason we decided against using one microcontroller that was China-only was that their "support" included a pirated and cracked version of Keil.

Uh, no.

As someone who doesn't speak Chinese, I can actually deal with Chinese datasheets, surprisingly (diagrams and hexadecimal generally don't need translation). Chinese support forums are a bit tougher if I can even get to them from outside China.

However, once you start exhibiting some level of casual illegality, that's a full stop.

Hopefully, RISC-V will side step a lot of this in the future by standardizing the toolset on something open-source.