Ken Hansen <[email protected]> wrote:
You realize the issue here is that criminals stole the design of
Prolific chips and sold copies, then the vendor coded their 'official'
driver to detect and refuse to work with the illegal copied chips, and
Microsoft, as a corporate policy, works to keep installed official
drivers up-to-date, right?
This is a perfectly logical action by Microsoft, and any deviation
from running the most current official driver would be an
accommodation to support illegal copies of Prolific chips.
[I apologize for turning this into a meta-discussion mostly unrelated
to CHIRP, but feel that some facts need to be cleared up.]
As I understand it, there are 2 issues here:
1) There are some fake chips which newer drives refuse to work with.
2) There are some legitimate Prolific parts that for some unknown
reason, Prolific doesn't want to support on Windows 11.
Case #2 is obviously not the user's fault. I'd argue that case #1 is
also not the user's fault, unless the item they bought was described
as "cable with fake Prolific chip".
Punishing the end user for either seems unfair. Canon tried pulling
trick #2 with their LiDE scanners, and VueScan showed that this was
just a money grab by Canon (to sell entire new scanners users didn't
need), and it provides its own scanner driver that is perfectly happy
running those old scanners on new Windows versions.
Microsoft just takes whatever drivers a hardware manufacturer pro-
vides and bundles them into the monthly update. This has led to many
problems in the past and will continue into the future, as they can
just say "Go talk to the company that wrote the driver - you didn't
by Windows directly from us, so you don't get any support from us".
Besides, they're busy enough fixing their own bugs that break systems
when updated.
I also find it amusing that people are holding FTDI up as some ex-
ample of a great company that doesn't do this - I guess the fact that
FTDI intentionally bricked fake FTDI chips instead of just refusing
to support them has faded from memory. Here's a refresher:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocent-users-chips-in-silent-update
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