alt Hacker NewsI suppose you could do a clean room reimplantation, but I doubt you could advertise it as HDMI 2.1 compliant without legal repercussions.
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HDMI is patent-encumbered. The original specification has lost patent protection, but VRR and the other bits which form HDMI 2.1 and 2.2 are still protected as part of the Forum's patent pool. You could certainly try and upstream an infringing implementation into the kernel, but no one would be able to distribute it in their products without a license.
What would the legal repercussions be against an anonymous coder who donated the code to multiple code forges? Action against the code forges themselves? I mean, not like they would be able to find the guy.
I saw chinese hw companies use "HDTV" or "HD" to avoid HDMI trademark usage.
I've seen a few devices not advertising HDMI at all. Just calling it a generic "Digital Video" output.
That's why you advertise it as HDMI 2.1 compatible instead. I believe there's precedence that allows that.