[sane-devel] New Backend newbie question

[Sunil William Savkar]

Erik--

As a lawyer, I am unsure there is an issue here with integrating the
Visioneer back-end, since if it indeed has been released to the public
with open ownership (i.e. no strict license rights and thus if anything
a broad license akin to ownership), then you could make some
modifications to it and as long as there is authorship acknowledgement,
your modified back-end can be included with the GPL.

IN essence the underlying code is public w/ a non-GPL license, but the
code + changes would be under GPL.  If someone wants non-GPL code at
that point, they would have to grab the originally released Visioneer
code.

The code w/ your modifications would have to be honored under the GPL.

Does this make sense?

Sunil

-----Original Message-----
From: sane-devel-admin@mostang.com [mailto:sane-devel-admin@mostang.com]
On Behalf Of Erik Strack
Sent: Saturday, March 02, 2002 6:03 PM
To: sane-devel@mostang.com
Subject: [sane-devel] New Backend newbie question

Hello to all,
   What does it normally take to get a sane backend integrated into the 
distribution?

    I'd like to get the Viceo backend integrated in, written by Steven 
Ellis and K W Lee.

    This backend is based on code graciously released by Visioneer -- 
obviously not under NDA because it's freely available.

    But it's my understanding that this poses a critical problem in 
getting the Viceo backend integrated into Sane?  (Since the 
Windows-originating code is not released under GNU GPL?  But it was 
released to the public, just maybe not with a GNU-style license...)

    This is quite frustrating for me, as I use my scanner a lot and 
mostly use Linux now... Support is quite good, including front-panel 
buttons.  I'd like to see support in the distros like Red Hat and 
Mandrake some day so I don't have to keep hacking and re-compiling 
forever...

    And I would think it's a good thing if the manufacturer releases 
their code and it can be used under Linux.  That saves potentially years

of time of writing, debugging, and optimizing the code to support the 
various chipsets, interfaces, and configurations... Hmm

    The driver in question, Viceo, now supports several pieces of 
hardware, including the Visioneer 8600, 7600, and a few other models too

I think.


Thanks for the time to answer any of my questions.

Sincerely,

Erik
(happy yet frustrated visioneer user)


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