Before we dive into the matter, you first have to understand what DisplayLink is. It is a proprietary graphics transport technology that lets computers connect to one or more external displays over USB, using docks or adapters built around DisplayLink chips.
It works by compressing display data on the host computer and sending it to a chip in the connected device. The chip then decodes it for output to monitors through interfaces such as HDMI or DisplayPort.
On Linux, this support can rub some people the wrong way due to its closed-source nature. That is where Mike Lothian’s (FireBurn) Vino comes in as an open alternative.
Unfortunately, Synaptics owns DisplayLink and has sent Mike cease-and-desist letters alleging that he infringed its DisplayLink patents with his project.
What’s Vino?
Vino is a driver that lets the Linux kernel talk to DisplayLink docks directly. It is meant to replace DisplayLink’s closed-source software and the open source EVDI kernel module that sits beside it.
Mike wrote it with help from Claude Code, and the first version reached the kernel mailing list in June, unfinished. He had faced a communication issue between the dock and the driver and asked other developers for help.
In early July (courtesy of LWN.net), he emailed a Synaptics employee for guidance and mentioned his Rust rewrite of EVDI. About two weeks later, a different employee replied.
That reply said his Rust rewrite of EVDI was not a thing of concern. Rather, the concern was the DisplayLink protocol and codec, which Synaptics believes are covered by its patents. Lawyers get involved
A cease-and-desist letter followed on August 17. It told Mike to stop development and withdraw anything he had submitted to maintainers and hosting sites, with a signed confirmation due by August 28.
An appendix listed over 125 patents without saying which applied. Mike posted a working version 3 of Vino on August 26 and asked Synaptics the next day which claims they had in mind.
The answer came in October as claim charts. They map one claim from each of two patents, GB2484736 and GB2485613, to his source code.
The October 5 letter said Synaptics would seek $25,000 for the cost of preparing those charts if Mike missed an October 11 deadline, with the figure rising by at least $25,000 each week.
Mike replied on October 6 (message 8) with an offer to pause public work on the encoding code the charts point to if Synaptics paused the deadline and the weekly charge. He also asked about licensing that code for non-commercial use.
On October 7, Synaptics said it would grant no patent license or promise not to sue and set October 18 as a final deadline.
What I can see so far is a very aggressive patent infringement witch hunt against a lone open source developer who was quite open to communication.
Synaptics took about three weeks to answer his request for specifics, then followed with a potentially life-ruining $25,000 demand that compounds weekly.
Clean room design quirks
Mike describes Vino as a clean-room driver and says he reverse engineered it from captured USB traffic and vendor programs.
If you didn’t know, in a clean-room recreation, one party studies the original implementation, then writes a description, and a separate party builds the new code from that description alone.
It is meant to act as a defense against copyright claims because it shows nothing was copied. Synaptics’ July reply argues that clean-room or independently written code can still infringe a patent.
The timing
Vino also lands in a busy stretch for AI-assisted reverse engineering, from smart TV cleanups to office suite clones. Legal pressure has reached other AI-built projects too.
Mike has already taken down the Vino repository in response to the demands, and Synaptics has not made a public statement so far.
Only time will tell what happens to the work, and I hope someone forked it before it went offline, as that would give others a good starting point to build on.
This is an incredibly bad idea on his part. Patents and copyright are not the same thing. It doesn’t matter at all if he genuinely reverse engineered it, if it violates their patent they have every right to sue him, and they’ll win. Claiming it’s a witch hunt also doesn’t matter. The court is not sympathetic to lone devs violating patents.
It used to be we could protect software with both copyrights and patents, because it was really hard to duplicate a large project. Now, with AI able to shit out a somewhat working implementation in a few days, we only have patents.
And software patents are a terrible idea, that should never exist.
They are certainly abused, but without them, there’s literally no protection from a big company stealing an entrepreneur’s idea and undercutting them. (Like what Facebook did to Snapchat.)
They should be reformed, but I think providing protections to inventors is not inherently a bad idea.
I am speaking as an inventor who has been issued a software patent, so take what you will from that. I’m happy that my idea can’t just be stolen by Google or Microsoft. (Or some slop slinger, for that matter.)
Fine, then you should be granted a patent only if you actually use it in a product you sell.
Patents are (now) a weapon for big companies to stop a potential competitor to even being able to compete.
Yeah, I would agree with that. There’s already precedent with trademarks. You must use a trademark or you can lose it.
In reality, patents and copyright almost never protect the “little guy,” and are exclusively to the benefit of large corporations. You don’t have functionally unlimited resources to throw at the legal system; They do.
It is an idea that sounds reasonable on its face, but falls apart badly when you consider the realities of enforcement.
Well, I am the “little guy” who is currently only protected by a patent and the fact that my project has not yet been released as self hostable. Once it is released, the only thing protecting me from big corporations will be the patent.
Else, they would just spin up my server software and offer it for less money, or free, since they can afford to undercut me until I go bankrupt.
If it weren’t for the patent, I wouldn’t even be considering releasing it as self hostable, and certainly would never consider releasing it as open source. Right now, I’m leaning toward a source available license (BUSL) that transitions to open source (AGPL). That way, I can license any individual who wants to use my project for personal use full access to do so, along with the source code, but any corporation who wants to compete with me would be violating my patent.
The problem here (similar to media codecs) is patents on interop, where if someone uses patents in a product or service, that pushes the patents onto not just people trying to directly compete, but also onto anyone trying to interoperate with that product or service, through no fault of their own. Thus abusing patents to block interoperability.
oh no the poor entrepenuer! Not. All software should be FOSS anyway.
Fun fact: I get to write open source software because proprietary software pays the bills.
While yes, I agree that software should be FOSS. I also think that people who invent something should get the freedom to choose if they want to make it FOSS or proprietary. They should get the option to make a business off of it or to just make it free. Nobody should be forced to do either and they should make the decision on their own.
I disagree fundamentally. Just because you came up with an idea first does not mean you should be the sole person able to use said idea. All this does is hamper the progress of civilization. You are under no obligation to tell others how you did something, but if they also figure out how to do it then the law should not shield you from competition and people making your thing cheaper. This is especially true in the case of software where its infinitely copyable at near 0 cost.
I’ve made things before. I’ve never tried to make a profit off of those things. Despite being broke myself. Because I see it as simply extortion to withhold something in exchange for money. The only way I’d ever monetize something digital is to give it out for free and ask for donations if people feel like it and it helps them. Something physical is slightly different as it costs money to make more of them, but I still disagree with the idea that you’d be able to ban others from using a technology just because you happened to patent it first.
You’re a big fan of monopolies, aren’t you?
Do you realize how much work it takes to make that infinitely copyable software though? Like, yes, it would be super awesome if all software was open source, but if it were, I would probably be working in finance instead.
You see it as extortion to withhold something for money? So all labor should be free? Everything should be free? I should be able to just go set up shop in the Empire State Building like I own the place? Or, is that one of those slightly different things? Maybe just the labor of the construction workers should have been free.
Value comes from labor. That value is tied to the specific thing being made. Even if your initial creation of the software is difficult the fact that it can be copied for no cost dilutes that labor value down to nothing. A new copy does not take money away from you. It does not steal your labor value. That is the anti-piracy argument and it is empircally false. As I said you are welcome to do a donationware model and still have it be entirely moral and I’m sure that you’d get more than your labors typical market value back. But what you want to be able to do is to withhold the code and not allow it to be copied without paying. So that you can extract infinite value from something that cost a finite amount to create initially and now costs nothing to copy. That is exploitative.
You’ve clearly never asked for donations for an open source project. I have. The vast majority of open source projects get no donations. Most of the rest get a small amount per month. Not enough to survive on. A handful get a lot of donations.
One of my libraries is used by about 3,800 other projects. It was actually the first popular UI library for the Svelte framework. I’ve not gotten one single donation for it. It has a donation page, and no one has ever taken me up on it. I’ve put hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours of work into that project since I started it in 2017. The only reason I was able to build it is that I also get paid to write proprietary software.
Most of the big, popular open source projects also only exist because of proprietary software. They get patches from the companies who use them.
That’s why I am telling you that what you’re advocating for could only work in a planned economy. I’m not going to work for free if I can’t afford to eat.
The argument for piracy was never about money. It was about ownership. I’m sorry that the reason you pirate is because you don’t want to financially support the artists. That’s very shameful. The reason I pirate is because after I’ve purchased some media, I want to own it.
So let me ask you this: can you list out all of the open source projects you’ve used, and how much you’ve donated to each one?
Honestly, it’s people like you, who feel entitled to my labor, who make me feel like it’s a mistake to release anything I make as open source.
I only disagreed with forcing all software to be open source. I believe that while copyrighting your code is fine, I agree with you on the patenting thing. You shouldn’t be able to patent software and sue anyone if they reverse engineer it. I do agree with you on this part. However, yes you should be able to have the freedom to choose if you want to do the right thing, make it open source, or the wrong thing, make it proprietary. Yes keeping this freedom slows innovation. It also gives people who make an idea more of a choice rather than being forced to do one thing. You shouldn’t be able to sue anyone who figures out how your software works though because it isn’t going to be the same code that you made.
Well yes, but proprietary only works with patents. All it means without them is you have to decompile it and reverse engineer it. Which is pretty easy to do these days.
But I’d push back on the idea of “The same code you made” being special. Code is just language and math put together. Take a sentence. “Hi, how are you?” under patent rules once someone patents that specific way to say this nobody else can do it. You can do the same function but have to phrase it differently. Like “Hello, are you well?” and eventually this just gets silly. Being the first to do something the most obvious way to do it shouldn’t give you a right to not let anyone else do it that way.
My argument is based on a fundamentally different way of viewing invention. Many people think of it as a singular inventor/genius coming up with an idea nobody had before, and then anyone else who has the same idea after them is “stealing” it. This is just silly imo. That inventor is not special.
Inventions do not happen because someone has a special idea. They happen because the material conditions exist to make them possible. You wouldn’t invent the car before the steam engine for example. Or the book before paper. Take Calculus. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were getting to the same conclusion (inventing calculus) around the same time entirely independently. Because it just so happened they were alive at the right time to do so.
In general inventions will arise some time after the conditions to create them exist. This relies on the work of all human civilization prior, and so these inventions should be the collective property of all humanity.
If one accepts the premise that discovery is an inevitable result of material conditions, the moral and economic justification for patents collapses. In this framework, the patent holder isn’t being rewarded for creating something that otherwise wouldn’t exist; they are being rewarded for being the first to reach a finish line that many others were already approaching. The patent then functions as a tool to capture a monopoly over a natural progression of knowledge, effectively taxing society for a discovery that would have happened regardless.
I’m not really trying to argue with you here btw. Just explaining my complete view on the topic. I get that you might agree with some of this, and disagree with some. I just wanted you to have a full picture of where I’m coming from.
Why not ? In the end I used my money to come up with a way to do things, I would argue that I am entitled to stop someone else to simply stole it and I can always license you my work so we both can make some money, you selling something without the need to reinvent it, I selling you something so I can recover my initial expense. (which is the idea behind patents in the first place)
The point would be to not have silly patents in the first place.
Your view I feel would only work in a communist, or at least extremely socialist, society. Under the American form of capitalism, that would essentially make being an inventor worthless. Whatever you invent will just be copied by the biggest competitor in the field. A system of necessary monopolies.
I don’t disagree that your view (under a system of extreme socialism) is a better way to set up a society than American capitalism. But unless we abolish capitalism, I think what you’re arguing for is worse for the proletariat than what we have.