[tmp26]

Price competition is great! The shady thing about the imitations is trying to insert themselves into someone else's supply & support chain, IMO.

Which is probably tied to the reason they didn't implement the ACM spec- from my limited hobbyist view, FTDI is the dominant player, so of course they would chose to mimic the non-standard ft232 instead of some underdog ACM player.

Oh, and as for costs, you're totally right that spinning a chip costs way more than a driver. But:

- A theme as I learn about fly-by-night companies is they piggyback on other operations. As the article observes, this knockoff required only 1 mask layer, because the rest is probably a standard microcontroller.

- Marketing & marketshare are probably the real reason, not getting out of writing drivers. Again, FTDI seems to be the entrenched player.