Franky i don't understand why the counterfeiters don't just release their own driver and separately Id the chip,.........
Frankly speaking, and call me a bigot if you need, but many Chinese manufacturers operate on cloning for cost reduction and not innovation.
Bingo. Writing drivers which work across a whole set of Windows version is difficult to say the least and requires long term commitment. FTDI has a track record of keeping their drivers running as the Windows platform evolves. There is a lot of value to that. The minimum you need is to to pay a driver engineer on a continuous basis to keep the driver working. I've dealt with driver level engineering for years: At minimum you have to make changes a few times a year to keep drivers working with new OS versions, new architectures, new security models etc.
Take a look at the FTDI driver page and realize the amount of platforms they support:
http://www.ftdichip.com/FTDrivers.htm It's pretty amazing and every single one has it's own issues/bugs which need to be worked around. They still support Windows 98!
I expect the next big change in drivers to be around USB security in general. As the 'BadUSB' exploit becomes used in the wild Microsoft will have to start to lock down USB to mitigate these kind of attacks. That will likely affect all drivers.
In the end a Chinese fly by company could never afford to write their own drivers. I also doubt that an open source project would be able to handle that given the amount of QA you need to do on drivers. It's very costly.
What I expect to see, honestly, is a slight change to the clones which inhibit the write, and then FTDI is back to square one, with a large consumer base that is FTDI phobic. Any man can create a lock which he himself cannot pick.
Correct. It sounds like the cloners will just adjust to the current situation and continue to make more fake chips. It could even drive more sales for them by selling it under a 'works with new FTDI driver' tag. In meantime you have a large base of angry customers.
I think the right strategy for FTDI would have been to enter the arms race like everyone else and start to include fingerprint/authentication silicon into their new chips like most companies now start to do. It sucks that we have to this route, but the lack of IP/copyright enforcement in various countries really forces the hand here. This lack of enforcement also affects open source software BTW. Tons of Chinese products use GPL software without ever releasing source code. My recent stint with security cameras show they are pretty much all using GPLd video/H.264/linux software. And no way for me to fix the broken software in those devices since they don't release source code...