Okay, its a good idea to destroy the reputation of a own product to destroy the market of clones. It's just like chemo therapie....
Sorry, in what way exactly is this like chemotherapy?
Lightages sums up my feelings well on the subject - I can honestly say that I will not now, knowingly, buy a product which claims to be an FTDI one because I cannot easily know whether I will get the genuine article. If the FTDI driver bricks it I can send it back and get (some of) my money back but why would I risk the hassle. I can see why they did this but it's totally a pyrrhic victory.
Oh and why is everyone assuming that the user would have the option of clicking "ignore" and the driver working anyway - surely you would inform the user "sorry the chip is not genuine" and just refuse to work after that.
OK, the savvy user will go back to an old version but to sabotage the hardware so that no driver will work with it - including the Linux ones - is just plain wrong.
This thread is currently going at ~100 views / minute.
I wonder if anyone from FTDI is following it, because it's the story of how people stopped using FTDI chips.
A new user called FTDI chip has already posted in this thread. FTDI don't care if people stop using clones of their chips.
They popped up and made one post, then disappeared (perhaps wisely).