Synaptics Appears To Use Legal Threats To Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver

From earlier in the year you may recall a new experimental open-source Linux driver for modern DisplayLink hardware. 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. Unfortunately, that open-source driver has disappeared following legal threats by Synaptics. I hadn't heard anything more on this in-development Rust kernel driver in a while until this morning when a Phoronix reader pointed out a troubling post on the mailing list that I missed. It appears Synaptics resorted to using their legal team to block this independent, community-developed driver on the basis of violating their patents. A cease and desist notice was sent to the Vino driver developer of this open-source driver. Those curious can find the various correspondence via attachments on this LKML thread. The Vino driver repository on GitHub is no longer publicly available. So don't look for an open-source, upstream DisplayLink driver in Linux anytime soon... The original USB2-era DisplayLink hardware worked well on Linux and even had open-source driver support, but looks now like Synaptics will ensure that no open-source driver exists for their latest IP around USB graphics.