remember that cheap clones also foster innovation, by spreading tools that would be completely inaccessible to people without money, that's how computers revolutionized the world.
With some cheap fake arduinos, cheap fake Saleae, and cheap fake FTDI chips, you can start prototyping while others are still counting their money to buy a $35 arduino. When you've established your working capital, you will buy brand-name stuff.
Arduino is an example of open hardware. You can't sell a branded Arduino clone, but you are perfectly entitled take the schematic, build a clone board and sell it for peanuts. Fake FTDI is more of a problem because of the recent debacle where the drivers wouldn't work with counterfeit chips.
I've often had Sparkfun boards fabbed via Oshpark, rather than buy and pay for expensive shipping from the States.
Making a cheap clone isn't really morally problematic to me. If a consumer has more options AND can make effective judgments about the level of quality they're buying, then consumers are probably happy. What is problematic is deceptive labeling/marketing such as saying "why yes, this is of course a genuine pacemaker".
And to be clear, the article is talking about that last kind. I think its terminology is rather off: I'd consider a "clone" to be something built to be similar, maybe compatible, but clearly marketed as its own thing, and the subject of the article would be "counterfeits." But for some reason they're using "clones" to describe stuff that's passed off as the original.
They don't have to make counterfeits to meet that goal though. For example, there are USB to serial chips like the ch340 that are genuine, but still cheap.
There's a certain amount of software out there that requires the non-standard bit banging features of the FTDI adapters. The cloners have done a really good job of implementing this (works better than the real thing, apparently).
My cheap fake Saleae is what convinced me to buy a real one a year later. (Logic is a lot nicer than Sigrok.) I'm mostly a software/IT guy, and EE is new to me, and I did not have a large starting budget.
Turns out it's a blast, but I quite simply would not have been able to buy what I needed to outfit a decent electronics bench if it wasn't for eBay and Shenzhen.
There have been many cases recently where counterfeit goods made it into genuine distribution channels, sometimes even being distributed by the original maker itself.
With some cheap fake arduinos, cheap fake Saleae, and cheap fake FTDI chips, you can start prototyping while others are still counting their money to buy a $35 arduino. When you've established your working capital, you will buy brand-name stuff.