Come on, take a deep breath. We're talking about bricking a serial to USB chip, not something worth shedding blood really.
As far as unethical behavior by corporation is concerned I really not think it's even noteworthy.
As far as unethical behavior by corporation is concerned I really not think it's even noteworthy.
We're talking infrastructure: if this was a civil engineer designing a road to spontaneously create potholes that would flatten tires on certain brands of vehicles, they'd be put in the slammer post haste. FDTI has no idea where their chips and drivers will end up, and as designers of such low-level infrastructure type devices, it is criminally negligent to intentionally brick hardware. If I designed a file I/O library to randomly corrupt data when used on Windows, I'd be criminally negligent.
As far as unethical behavior by corporation is concerned I really not think it's even noteworthy.
Destroying other people's hardware to try to ensure your profits? No, not unethical or noteworthy at all.
And if a civil engineer designs a bump in the road that will destroy your suspension if you are driving above the speed limit they have set, we'd just call it a speed bump
I said it was unethical.
I say it might not be noteworthy when you compare it to business who are actually hurting human beings right now: companies who destroy ecosystems, companies who employ underpayed workforce in sweatshops to increase their profit margin. Companies who sell tools and weapons used to oppress people in authoritarian countries. I could go on for a long time enumerating the list of unethical behaviors in the industry before I hit the "releasing drivers that willingly brick IP infringing copies". So yes I find your reaction a bit over the top even if you're right that they deserve to get some backlash for this type of shoddy behavior.