[sane-devel] FW: SANE back-end development

[m. allan noah]

last time i checked, there were no lawyers on this list. it does not 
matter what any of us thinks about how possible your plan is, it matters 
what they lawyers think. you simply MUST ask your companies legal counsel.

but as a personal note, i agree strongly with abel. do not say that it is 
'supported by sane' when what you should say is 'SANE compliant' or 
'works with SANE'. also, dont miss the point of SANE, it is multi-os, not 
just a linux driver. when you support sane normally (source code) you are 
building a driver for your equipment on dozens of unix variants (plus os/2)

if you go and distribute a binary only module, then you only partially 
support SANE, and your statement becomes even more cloudy, even to the 
point of having to not mention sane at all...

allan

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, abel deuring wrote:

> David Chamberlin wrote:
> > Does anyone know if it  is  possible to develop a binary distribution of a
> > sane back-end that uses a proprietary protocols and  to distribute this
> > back-end with sane-backends? 
> > Can manufacturers that make only binary back-ends  advertise  "Supported by
> > Sane" or "Runs on Linux"?
> 
> IANAL, but I would object to the term "supported by Sane". The Sane
> developers can't provide any support for such a binary-only backend, so
> there's not support by Sane. Considering my bad experience with a
> binary-only driver for the wireless network chip RTL8180 under Linux, I
> think the term "may work with Sane" would be appropriate. Or - hoping
> that Kyocera will do a better job than Realtek supporting Linux or other
> Unices - something like "Sane compatibility provided by Kyocera". In
> other words: If users of such a binary-only backend encounter problems,
> I'd like to have the responsibilties clearly stated. I'm sure that these
> users will ask this mailing list, but I'd like to be able to point them
> to the authors of the binary-only stuff.
> 
> Abel
> 
> 

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