Yes they may be, but in the Sega v. Accolade case I mentioned earlier it was decided that copying of both copyrighted and trademarked material for interoperability purposes is fair use. In that case Accolade had to literally embed "SEGA" inside their ROM and send the text to the Genesis III in order for it to boot their games. The Ninth Circuit court ruled that this constituted fair use.
That's been the case since Windows 7 for 64-bit drivers, hasn't it? What's changing with 11?
This is apparently being done to improve kernel security and reliability. It could be a PR disaster depending how it is rolled out...
People can blame things like the old generic PC-case-bling LED driver CVE people and even its original author lost patience with years ago... lol =3
Again, that's been the case since Windows 7. You have to go out of your way to boot the system in "Test Mode" to install an unsigned driver. Either that, or use Zadig to self-sign the driver. (Maybe they're no longer allowing that?)
Signatures were enforced only for 64-bit drivers in Windows 7, but Windows 10 enforces them for all drivers.
https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-driver-signing-bala...
We won't know the actual collateral damage till the update is released. =)
The only update even mentioned in that article is "Windows 10, version 1607 (the Anniversary Update released in August 2016)". In case you haven't noticed, that happened 9 years ago...
I do agree the cost of the chips are insane however, they're ultimately worth paying for because of the driver support and 'just works' factor.
Sure, anyone paying for a Microsoft certified hardware driver, USB PID allocation, and cert fees every year... Everyone else is not allowed in the OS we paid for...
It is a decades old serial port emulation chip... Racketeering with a computer should still be illegal. =3
If it were free or cheap, than people would have just started another domain squatting business. That could have been far worse. =3
> lsusb
or
C:\> Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match '^USB' } | Format-List
are considered copyrighted IP in North America. Many of the paid device codes are often not like other Communication Device Class drivers or free generic HID devices listed in the USB standard.
Early next year Windows 11 will be locking out unsigned drivers from the OS. Good for keeping the kernel more consistent, but could be bad for hobby hardware drivers.
Personally, I think it is ludicrous, but for 83% of users they have no other option than pay $6.32 for a $$0.43 chip. =3