Synaptics Sends 125 Patents After One Developer's AI-Built Linux Driver

This week's running story is AI's collision with open source. On Monday a kernel maintainer quit reviewing because of the patch flood. On Wednesday, a different kind of blow landed: a company using patent law to kill an open source driver, one that happened to be written with an AI's help. What Vino was DisplayLink is Synaptics' proprietary system for pushing video over USB to docks and adapters. On Linux it has always been an uneasy fit: you need the vendor's closed-source software and the open EVDI kernel module beside it, and plenty of users find it flaky. Mike Lothian, who goes by FireBurn, got fed up with the crashes and wrote Vino, a Rust driver that lets the kernel talk to DisplayLink docks directly, replacing both the blob and EVDI. He built it with help from Claude Code. By the end it worked across three generations of docks, according to It's FOSS. In June the first, unfinished version hit the kernel mailing list. Source: https://itsfoss.com/news/synaptics-vino-fiasco/ The timeline reads like a trap In early July, Lothian did the decent thing and emailed Synaptics about his Rust rewrite of EVDI. Two weeks later an employee replied: the rewrite itself was not a concern. Th...