Mike Lothian got Vino working on three generations of DisplayLink docks, but Synaptics told him to take it down.

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.

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    39 minutes ago

    I am simply pointing out an unfortunate fact of how digital goods work. I am not saying your labor has no value inherently, but that because the product can be infinitely reproduced it becomes so diluted as to approach 0. Imagine an artist made a sculpture. It has immense value because it was very hard to make. Yet if they could snap their fingers and create 2? And then 20? 200? 2000? Suddenly its not worth very much.

    You literally are saying that my labor has no value, because the product it produces is digital. A sculpture can be duplicated with a mold. Doing so without the permission of the artist is illegal, because a statue is considered copyrighted material. Just because you own a copy of the statue, or even the original statue, does not mean that you can make and sell copies of it. Are you arguing that you should be able to do that?

    It’s even worse because with digital goods anyone can do the copying.

    Just like anyone can make a print of someone’s painting. Or make a mold of someone’s statue. Or make a copy of someone’s book. What you’re describing is an inherent property of art, not just digital goods.

    The reason I say the current model of proprietary software is exploitative is because it attempts to legally enforce a monopoly of this infinitely reproducable commodity in order to extract infinite profit from society in exchange for its use.

    You are describing copyright law. Without it, artists and other creatives would not be able to profit from their work. Also, “infinite profit” is not a thing. I don’t know why you keep saying it.

    I will clarify about the monetization model. If you wanted to write some code, then tell people they can access it for a set fee, and once accessed it has no DRM, no restriction on copying, etc then that’s fine. It’s not the act of asking for money in itself but the act of attempting to claim ownership over all the infinite copies I take issue with.

    That’s the opposite of what you said earlier. Also, as an admitted pirate, you seem to take issue with this model.

    What good is protecting the first copy, if I cannot protect any other copies? Should I seek to sell a year’s work of software for $100k to one guy, then just be done with it? I don’t think anyone would buy it. That’s an extremely silly model that absolutely would not work in reality.

    There are many ways to monetize something without doing that. One of them is asking for donations. One is the single payment before access to an unrestricted product model above, and there’s all kinds of other ways too.

    And you seem to have a problem with all of them except donation, according to your previous comments. I think in this comment, maybe you’re coming around to my side?

    I do understand why you are upset by what points I made. I just think that you are wrong that we need to be fully communist to implement a different model. Many of the current issues with open source not recieving many donations, and not having much in the way of support is because of the massive companies with proprietary software that absorb all the software markets value for themselves. This also fragments the software infrastucture of society.

    I’m not really upset with your points, I’m appalled by your entitlement. The points you made show a very clear dismissal of the value of software. I myself am a user of plenty of open source software, but I have a completely different attitude about it. I would never believe I am entitled to a piece of software. If the developer wants to give it to me for free, I will graciously accept it and thank them for that, because, and I cannot stress this enough, no one is entitled to the products of their labor but themself.

    It is the attitude I see that you’ve displayed here that makes working as an open source developer so disheartening sometimes. I am literally giving you free stuff, and you are not gracious, you act entitled. You act like (and say outright) the mere fact that the product I’ve produced can be copied means my labor is worthless. Not that I have given you something of worth, for free, but that I have given you something worthless, that I owed you.

    Most of the funding for software in general comes from huge companies. But they lock down the things they pay for. So nobody else can use them. This means open source devs have to reinvent the wheel to get anything done. If you got rid of the proprietary model companies would still have a need for software, and would still pay to have it made, but their software could then be repurposed for other uses. Developers would get paid for their initial labor by the companies and then the product is out there and can be copied for free by everyone else. This does not require communism to work. It just requires restrictions on how software can be locked down.

    I am telling you, and I know you won’t believe me, but I feel it’s important you hear it from someone who’s been both in the software industry and an open source developer for almost three decades, you do not understand how the software industry works.

    The overwhelming majority of software is funded through either advertising or subscriptions. Directly, being a binary or SaaS product offered to the customer, or indirectly, being a library or project supported by companies doing the former or paid for by services available through it as a platform. Only a minuscule amount of overall funding and contribution comes from donations from end users of open source projects. I think you understand this, but you seem to think that if all software were open source, this would change. It wouldn’t.

    To give you an example, XNU is an open source operating system kernel. It is not funded by donations. It is funded by literally one company, and pretty much only used in their products. What difference does it make that it’s open source? To me, it’s exactly as useful as the Windows kernel, even though it’s open source. It’s not useful because being open source is not what makes a piece of software useful to the broader software development community. It is the community behind it and the direction and stewardship of the project.

    Now as to the personal point. You asked above to list all FOSS software I use and say how much I’ve donated. I can’t list everything. I assume that was a point you were trying to make about the invisibility of things like libraries. So how are they meant to get donations? I use Debian. I give money to Debian. Not much, but I try to give them 5-10$ every year. I’m not a wealthy person. In fact I live below the poverty line. But I do this anyway because I appreciate what Debian does. It’s my opinion that the way this should be structured is as follows:

    Visible Software (OS) -> Infrastucture A -> Infrastucture B

    Visible Software collects donations. It has the visibility to request them. It should then be required (by law? by expectation and social pressure? We would need enforcement, I am aware.) to have a list of attestations. What other FOSS projects made their project possible? To what extend did they do so? Then Debian in this case would need to take their 10$ donation and divy it up. Infrastucture A was used by them then is given 1.50$ by them from that 10$. If Infrastucture B was used by A then A would need to figure out how much they helped it and pass on some to them. Say 50 cents. This would act like a donation dispersion model where a donation to Debian is a donation to all the infrastucture that makes Debian possible by proxy. This is sort of how Debian works now tho I don’t think they have it down to quite a science.

    I mean, yeah, you see where I was going with this, but you still aren’t getting it. Just by using Debian, you are using thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of open source projects. At least you are giving two coffees worth of donations a year to one of them.

    How do you think these projects stay funded? It isn’t from users like you. It’s from proprietary software companies who rely on them. Or, in the case of the majority of them, they are not funded. They are made by volunteers, for free. Unless we switch to a planned economy where they would be funded by the government, that’s going to remain how it is.