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Comments (85)

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  pona-a
  I do find using AI in a clean-room reverse-engineering project amounts to shooting yourself in the foot: you're sleep-walking into a legal minefield in an already legally gray field, and also risk over-relying on the AI's trial-and-error instead of developing a solid intuition of its functioning yourself.At the same time, if we're being honest, Synaptics will have sent the C&D no matter what. They are an anti-consumer company with more lawyers than engineers, so of course they'll use all their resources to bully any competition, especially the most vulnerable.
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  skissane
  The developer of the driver is in the UK. Given how the UK legal system works, I understand why the developer likely sees non-compliance with Synaptics’ demands as involving excessive personal risk.However, there are many other countries worldwide whose legal systems are very different, and would be much less favourable to Synaptics—what will they do if (say) a Chinese or Russian developer takes over the project?
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  nerdjon
  This is frustrating, I have had a growing distrust (and just frustration with the software in the first place) of DisplayLink with the Dock that I use, I would love alternative software.This also just seems stupid to me, you don't pay for the DisplayLink software you pay for the hardware. More options for how to use your hardware would be a good thing to them would it not?Though it sounds like much of the issue was that it wasn't really "clean-room" which is a separate issue. Though unclear if that really is at the root of it or not.
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  ectoloph
  > If you are not currently represented by competent legal counsel, I strongly recommend that you obtain legal representation promptly. You are going to need it."You are going to need it" sounds ominous.I think the cat is somewhat out of the bag with open models around though, their capabilities for pretty much uninhibited RE are scary.
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  ada-h00k
  I hope someone has archived the repository so it can be hosted somewhere where those ridiculous Western copyright and patent laws don't apply.
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  nijave
  If they were smart, they'd welcome an effort to make DisplayLink not a piece of trash.
• dTal
  How can they simultaneously argue that 1) this is a patent infringement, the entire legal basis of the claim, and 2) it is a unlicensed disclosure of proprietary technology? The whole point of patents is to disclose technology.
• stuaxo
  Project should have generated some specs that a follow up clean room project could use.
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  viraptor
  This is an utterly confusing and self sabotaging system. I had lots of issues with displaylink on a Mac. (Daily crash on the first video call of the day for some reason) Does the support care? No. Can I debug using the logs? No - THEY'RE ENCRYPTED! And now they're fighting for customers to not be able to use the hardware.Save yourself time and money - avoid DisplayLink.At least part of the effort was posted in mailing list though https://lwn.net/Articles/1078474/ - I hope the recent repository has been mirrored too.There's also https://github.com/durhamaustin9/DisplayLink-Drivers-Reconst... you may want to preserve locally.
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  ctkhn
  Can't wait til there's a good alternative. Displaylink is such a pain
• jeroenhd
  Synaptics is a terrible company and DisplayLink is a steaming pile of shit. The only reason this god-awful display standard exists is that everyone from Apple to business laptops cheaps out on GPU hardware, necessitating docks to deal with this hacky workaround.Even Apple has real GPU support for multiple displays now. It's time for DisplayLink to die.
• Garlef
  Why not open source an extensive test suite for such a driver (without the actual driver)?Would this be less prone to takedowns?
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  kittikitti
  Recently, I was shopping for docking stations or USB hubs. The lack of support for DisplayLink on Linux is a huge barrier for me. I won't buy a hub, docking station, or otherwise if it requires DisplayLink. If Synpatics didn't do this, I would have changed my filter to include their products and likely purchase DisplayLink technology. It's disappointing that they are intentionally blocking large segments of the market and free technology to make their products better and more profitable. I'm sure their lawyers are getting paid for this. I cannot understand this move by Synaptics any other way.
• paaloeye
  clean-room + AI + Rust together equals incoming C&D pretty much instantly
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  LoganDark
  Holy shit, this legal contact is utterly pissed:> In addition, as I have previously made clear to you, by open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a "hobbyist," you would be single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our market-leading proprietary technology. We have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent such disclosures and protect our market space. Your actions are potentially putting tens of millions of dollars of yearly corporate revenue at risk.> In short, by your ongoing actions, you are effectively making a significant, dramatic, and grave business decision on behalf of Synaptics and DisplayLink that you have absolutely no authority to make. Given the magnitude of the potential damages at stake, we cannot and will not let this happen. We demand your immediate cessation of your infringing activities, and we will continue to escalate this matter through every available legal channel if you fail to comply.
• nekusar
  NEXT TIME, PUBLISH TO gitflic.ruThats where all the anti-DRM tools are, along with Bypass paywalls free, and a bunch of other useful "illegal" tools.And the real answer: use OcuLink. It's just a PCIE lane->cable hardware, and is simple, cheaper, and just works. Doesnt even use drivers, as its just an extension of the PCIE lanes. Standard Linux tools work perfectly.
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  kmeisthax
  > That "Vino" driver for DisplayLink driver was a clean-room reverse-engineered DisplayLink driver that was developed in part by AI and written in Rust.It is my strongly-held opinion that, regardless of what you think about AI in general, reverse engineering projects ought to stay as far away as possible from LLM code gen as possible. They are a very easy and straightforward way for a copyright owner to claim access to their code, since basically ALL code was trained on. Unless you have hard evidence the particular bit of code you want to RE was not in the training set, you should not use an LLM to reverse-engineer or rewrite it.This is not a moral argument; as much as I hate AI companies playing fast and loose with other people's work, the underlying arguments that make RE legal work much better if you do not look at the source code. And while US judges are straining to keep AI training fair use, that does not make the AI a copyright laundering device. A copyright owner can absolutely reach through a fair use to get to you. Think of it like if you downloaded 10 different YouTube video essays on the same movie and attempted to stitch them together into a normal copy of the underlying movie. Obviously, your use has a different (and worse) legal status than the reviews do.Also, fuck Synaptics.
• vee-kay
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