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.
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.
Did fuck off, he's not being entitled you're just too fucking corrupted by capitalism to see a better way.
Telling a software engineer that their labor is worthless and being paid for their work through anything but donations is immoral is pretty fucking entitled. He literally feels entitled to the products of my labor. That’s actually his argument.
I’m a big fan of open source. So much so that probably 90% of the software I’ve written is open source. But people like him are the same kind of people who come into my support forums and rudely demand that I fix a bug immediately because it’s affecting them.
And people like you, defending people like him because you have stars in your eyes about a system that we don’t live under, don’t help. Yes, capitalism sucks, but it’s what we live under. Am I “corrupted by capitalism” because I want to be paid for my work so I can eat and pay rent? It’s giving
You're completely misunderstanding their point.
I think you are, my man. Go back and read what he wrote. He’s arguing that it is immoral to charge money for a digital good that can be copied easily without destroying the original. In other words, software. He said all software should be open source, and the only way anyone should make money from it is donations. He said that the value of the labor of a software engineer is zero because the product of that labor can be infinitely copied. (This would include the value of the labor of all artists, btw. Musicians, voice actors, authors, 3D modelers, graphic designers, CAD engineers, journalists, photographers, etc. Anyone who produces works that can be represented digitally.)
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.
It's even worse because with digital goods anyone can do the copying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully this clarified my position for you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the fallacy. It is not simply "My money/time" -> "Unique thing". The entire technological base of human civilizatio made it possible for you to make that thing. Most of the costs were bore by society. Yet you would now wish to privitize the profits and deny society access to that way to do things without your permission.
Take open heart surgery for example. There is very clearly a right way to do it. Perhaps a few good ways to do it too. But 1 way is the BEST way. Imagine if only 1 surgeon owned the patent to that best way. Other surgeons have to figure out their own way. Even if they figure out the same way as him independently he did it first so they can't use it. This would make that surgeon very rich, but it would harm medicine overall, and harm heart surgery's progress.
Then what happens? Let's take the language example. "Hi, how are you?" is patented. "Hello, are you well?" is patented. "Howdy!" is patented. etc. You want to greet someone. Now you don't just need to figure out a way to do that. You have to make sure YOUR way to greet someone is different than the thousands of patented ways to greet someone. So you have to do something like "Hey, hey, hey! Me say welcome to you! Haha! Good, yes?" this is what I meant by it getting silly. All the obvious ways to do something become patented and so you have to find some roundabout way to get the same result. Which is usually inefficient and complicated for no good reason.
Patents also do not simply stop "stealing" as you put it. If you and someone else both put in the effort to independently invent the "turns lead to gold" machine then whoever patents it first owns it. The other person, despite also putting in the effort and not even knowing you exist, just has to basically go fuck themselves.
But I'd push back on even that. You don't own an idea. Because 99.99% of the effort to get to the point where that idea could exist was not yours. It was every other humans. You stand on the shoulders of giants and touch the stars. Then want to claim the stars as your own.
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.
Why? The way I see it the current system only serves to concentrate the profits in the hands of the corporations that hold the patents and IP. In what way would removing that harm the working class?
Corporations aren’t the only entities that can hold patents and IP.