[overgryphon]

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.