> 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." ?
AdmiralAsshat
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.
kieranl
> 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.
hnlmorg
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!
xxpor
What financial damage does the Linux driver cause to Synaptics, if the hardware can only be made by them, and the driver increases the number of devices where that hardware is usable?
Also, if the concern is that he would be educating the competitors, that is what the patent is supposed to do, describe the invention. And in any case, the developer could, instead of a driver, write a book describing how SystemLink works and that would not violate any patent.
jcarrano
Years ago, when i was migrating my dell work laptop to debian, i had the same problem: we had many dell docking stations and they all used displaylink.
I was pretty quick about it: they are now useless bricks.
We live in the golden age of USB-C + DP alt mode: USB C to the monitor, and that provides power, connection, video, monitor connects to a 30 euro docking with many USB, gigabit ethernet, additional video. No shitty drivers, no USB dropping randomly crashing your dock, no giant power brick and 300-something bricks.
Depending on the screen you can also daisy chain them.
Moving to a different desk require to just plug in one cable. One. And you can do all the above with an android phone, too, if it supports desktop mode you have a functional desktop inyour pocket (well, as much as a chromebook).
I have no need for those shoddy bricks anymore, or HDMI for that matter. (if only console makers and TV would drop HDMI, that would be a dream)
monegator
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
cbdumas
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)
I used to work for DisplayLink and was there during the Synaptics takeover. It was a great place to work initially.
At one point I understood DL3 inside-out having implemented it on the GPU. I’ve mostly forgotten how it works now (but still remember enough to get me in trouble, so don’t ask). I never worked on the Linux driver, only the Windows one.
There were some reasonably smart people there. Some of my colleagues worked on the wireless adaptor for the HTC Vive VR headset just before I joined.
DisplayLink was extremely protective of its IP, and Synaptics even more so, so this behaviour doesn’t really surprise me.
After the acquisition there was multiple rounds of layoffs and it was no longer such a nice place to work. I regret staying as long as I did.
Personally, I’ve never felt the need to use one of our docks. In my home office, I have two displays connected to my Linux laptop, one via the HDMI port and the other via USB-C to HDMI. Then I just have a cheap USB hub that I keep my peripherals attached to. So yes, that’s four cables (including power) I have to plug/unplug, but at least I don’t have my CPU/GPU running hot all the time and I don’t see compression artefacts.
comments (10)
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." ?
AdmiralAsshat
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.
kieranl
There is no universe in which this is a reasonable response.
hnlmorg
xxpor
Also, if the concern is that he would be educating the competitors, that is what the patent is supposed to do, describe the invention. And in any case, the developer could, instead of a driver, write a book describing how SystemLink works and that would not violate any patent.
jcarrano
I was pretty quick about it: they are now useless bricks.
We live in the golden age of USB-C + DP alt mode: USB C to the monitor, and that provides power, connection, video, monitor connects to a 30 euro docking with many USB, gigabit ethernet, additional video. No shitty drivers, no USB dropping randomly crashing your dock, no giant power brick and 300-something bricks.
Depending on the screen you can also daisy chain them.
Moving to a different desk require to just plug in one cable. One. And you can do all the above with an android phone, too, if it supports desktop mode you have a functional desktop inyour pocket (well, as much as a chromebook).
I have no need for those shoddy bricks anymore, or HDMI for that matter. (if only console makers and TV would drop HDMI, that would be a dream)
monegator
cbdumas
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)
mijoharas
https://www.onsemi.com/company/newsroom/news-and-insights/on...
solarengineer
At one point I understood DL3 inside-out having implemented it on the GPU. I’ve mostly forgotten how it works now (but still remember enough to get me in trouble, so don’t ask). I never worked on the Linux driver, only the Windows one.
There were some reasonably smart people there. Some of my colleagues worked on the wireless adaptor for the HTC Vive VR headset just before I joined.
DisplayLink was extremely protective of its IP, and Synaptics even more so, so this behaviour doesn’t really surprise me.
After the acquisition there was multiple rounds of layoffs and it was no longer such a nice place to work. I regret staying as long as I did.
Personally, I’ve never felt the need to use one of our docks. In my home office, I have two displays connected to my Linux laptop, one via the HDMI port and the other via USB-C to HDMI. Then I just have a cheap USB hub that I keep my peripherals attached to. So yes, that’s four cables (including power) I have to plug/unplug, but at least I don’t have my CPU/GPU running hot all the time and I don’t see compression artefacts.
rjinman