Synaptics Uses Patents to Shut Down an Open-Source DisplayLink Driver
Synaptics patent claims stop work on DisplayLink drivers
A Scottish developer built Vino, a Rust driver to fix his crashing Dell DisplayLink dock on Linux, with help from an LLM. Instead of assistance, Synaptics — which acquired DisplayLink in 2022 — sent a cease-and-desist citing 125 patents and demanding he pull his kernel patches. OIN declined to protect him because codecs fall outside its Linux System Definition, and he has now taken the repository down.
An independently written or clean-room implementation does not necessarily avoid patent infringement if it implements patented inventions.
- AdmiralAsshat
> If you fail to comply with our demands by the specified deadline, Synaptics will seek monetary
compensation from you in the amount of US$25,000 to recoup the costs and effort required to
create the attached documentation of your infringing acts.
Obviously this is intended as a scare tactic, but, surely that could never hold up in court? Surely the burden of proof is on the owner of the patents to prove that someone's work is infringing, and you can't then say "We are charging the defendant to prove that we have a valid case against them." ?
- hnlmorg
> I will also be sending to you our demand for substantial monetary compensation to recoup the cost and effort required to create such documentation of your infringing acts.
There is no universe in which this is a reasonable response.
- kieranl
DisplayLink is dying due to high DDR prices. Dock companies are cancelling their display link portfolios due to the unfavorable economics.
Good riddance if this is how OSS is treated by synaptics.
Most recent thunderbolt docks and usb4 docks have good display support, and fallback to DisplayPort alt mode if the host does not support tbt4. Which is much better supported over type-c. Intel and AMD upstream host support.
- xxpor
I didn't think reverse engineering itself was a violation of a patent? The entire point of a patent is the public disclosure of the mechanism of an invention for the exclusive right to market that invention. Therefore arguing that reverse engineering is a violation of a patent is definitionally incorrect. They should be arguing it's a violation of trade secrets. Of course, they'd lose on that argument too because clean room reverse engineering of a trade secret is fine because you definitionally don't have a patent on it! That's the patent vs trade secret tradeoff!
- cbdumas
DisplayLink is a "clever" software workaround to hardware limitations that shouldn't exist anymore and I hope it goes away. When I got stuck with a DisplayLink dock at work it caused no end of audio issues when connecting and disconnecting, the driver had to be restarted all the time, it was a pain
- mijoharas
My company used to have some display link docks, which I was unable to use due to bugs in the Linux implementations.
For a while I'd keep an eye on updates to see if they'd been fixed but they never were before we moved office.
I'm going to be quite sure we don't get any more in any future offices (we don't have them at our current office)
- solarengineer
Might be related to the acquisition by onsemi:
https://www.onsemi.com/company/newsroom/news-and-insights/on...
- luckystarr
Is DisplayLink a company owned by Synaptics or just a file in a portfolio? How do they make money from DisplayLink except from selling the docks? Licensing?