Your use of the word "blame" implies that you think
there's some wrongdoing on the part of someone other than
FTDI.
I don't see it as particularly controversial to say that, when someone selling an item claims it's a certain brand, I expect that to be the truth.
For example, if I buy an apple iphone I expect to get an apple iphone and if the supplier instead sends me a fake I regard that as wrongdoing on the part of the supplier.
Likewise, if a designer has specified an FTDI part and someone in the supply chain has substituted a fake, I'd regard that as wrongdoing.
Right. That would be the trademark infringement I mentioned. But aside from that, the fakes get the job done. Aside from who ends up getting the revenue, it's basically no different than if FTDI started producing a new revision of the product that had a different internal layout. Accidental second-sourcing doesn't really hurt anyone other than the first source. Everyone downstream of whoever bought the counterfeits is innocent, and even the company that procured the counterfeits has probably only made forgivable mistakes given that the counterfeits are near-perfect substitutes. The supplier of the counterfeits is guilty of trademark infringement, but is otherwise fulfilling all their obligations to provide the required component.
Accidental second-sourcing doesn't
really hurt anyone other than the
first source.
It hurts the entire electronics industry industry if I can't trust that a part is what it's labelled as, or if I can't trust a supplier not to deliver fake parts.
If your suppliers can substitute a fake FTDI part, why not label 10% precision resistors as 1% precision, or label 1,000-operating-hour capacitors as 30,000-operating-hour, or label parts that failed temperature range binning as having passed temperature range binning?
And the people who really lose out from this aren't the Apples and Samsungs of this world, who do enough business that the promise of future work can keep the suppliers honest - it's the small manufacturers and kickstarter projects that aren't big enough to have the leverage to keep their suppliers in line.
None of that corner-cutting is being alleged here. Nobody but FTDI has been complaining about the counterfeits. This has every indication of being more like a big pharmaceutical company complaining about generic drugs. If these clones are actually deficient in some way, then they're a much bigger problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
For example, if I buy an apple iphone I expect to get an apple iphone and if the supplier instead sends me a fake I regard that as wrongdoing on the part of the supplier.
Likewise, if a designer has specified an FTDI part and someone in the supply chain has substituted a fake, I'd regard that as wrongdoing.