[sane-devel] Re: ISCAN 1.10.0 and Mandrakelinux Cooker

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Aug 24 11:57 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (shortened):
> I've summarised your concerns and forwarded them up the food chain.
> From there they should hopefully make it to the people at EPSON who
> decide (and pay for) what kind of work EPSON KOWA does on iscan.

Thanks a lot!
We look forward to hearing from the decision makers at EPSON KOWA.


> FWIW, personally I agree with most, if not all, of your opinions

I would be happy if you tell me if you disagree with some of
my opinions because I really want to learn about the obstacles.
I think if we know the obstacles we will find a solution.

Please note the details in
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/11/jsmeix_print-info-for-manufacturers.html
for example:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Linux drivers ... must
    * have an open source code
    * be subject to a sufficiently free license ...
    * have a platform-independent source code 
Thus, we will be able to integrate it in our products
...
Although this does not mean that we cannot integrate any proprietary
software in our products, it does mean that we cannot do this
regularly but only if it is interesting for us. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

If we added proprietary drivers which are limited to i386 compatible
platforms we would have a lot of additional work regarding scanners.
For example the setup tool, the documentation and our support and
sales teams must be enhanced/trained regarding platform-dependance
and the proprietary license.

If EPSON KOWA would like to pay us for all those efforts we could
of course include their proprietary drivers ;-)

By the way:
Are there problems to make platform-independent scanner drivers?
Are the normal kernel device IO methods sufficient to make
scanner drivers?
I think for scanners which work via "libusb" this is o.k. and for
SCSI even more but perhaps there are some weird scanners which
require platform-specific stuff (e.g. timing problems)?


Kind regards
Johannes Meixner
-- 
SUSE LINUX AG, Maxfeldstrasse 5                 Mail: jsmeix@suse.de
90409 Nuernberg, Germany                    WWW: http://www.suse.de/