[sane-devel] discussion: Future of SANE-project

[m. allan noah]

it is important to remember that the developers of sane are volunteers 
just like you. most of us got involved because we had a lame scanner too. 
we probably dont have time for such evangelism.

that said, even if someone had the time to run around and convince vendors 
of the merits of sane, there would be at least two recurring sentiments:

1. sane spec is not complete, cause it does not support various 
LEDs,buttons or sensors that the manufacturers believe add so much value 
(and brand distinction) to their products.

2. they are going to want more control over the gui so they can do things 
like show pictures and diagrams of the scanner, which means they are going 
to write their own front-end half the time.

then, i as a developer, and hopefully you as an open-source/free software 
user would have another complaint:

3. closed-source backends are much harder to debug/extend than free, even 
if you have the vendor to complain to.

that said, there are a couple vendors who do make backends (brother comes 
to mind).

allan

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, David N. Paules wrote:

> I subscribed to this developer list to monitor and hopefully contribute to getting my lame UMAX Astra 2100U working natively on Mac OS X. Apparently that will never happen. I then noticed lots of messages about Epsons, and other 'big name' scanner vendors. This got me to wonder. While the SANE project is a fascinating and honorable goal, is anyone selling the benefits of SANE to the scanner manufacturers?
> 
> My point is that this project will constantly have to be supported from people like myself who are irritated that their scanner doesn't work on different hardware/ OSes than what the maker originally intended (or cares about). However, if the SANE architecture is so much better than existing dominant TWAIN architecture, then someone should be pitching this story to the scanner manufacturers. If Epson, HP, UMAX, Dell, Primax, etc. agree to support this open source initiative (i.e, provide SANE backends), the hope is that their scanners will be better supported on more hardware, reaching more customers and improving satisfaction with EVERY customer. And, users can freely change front-end applications without worrying about loss of functionality. So it should be easier for the scanner manufacturers to change what application software is bundled with their scanner (photo scanner software, OCR software, etc.), avoiding their own issues with vendor lock-in.
> 
> Otherwise, the developers on the SANE project will always be writing backends for 'old' scanners. In effect, they will ALWAYS be playing catch-up with what already works on at least one OS and driver config.
> 
> The other option is to get the SANE architecture to be a standard on *nix boxes which means getting developers of the various *nix OSes to bundle pre-compiled SANE with their OS. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is the closest analogy I can think of. Printer makers that want printers to work with *nix systems build in support for CUPS because it is a *nix standard.
> 
> Again, are the project leaders of SANE considering these options? I don't see any 'official' support from the scanner makers which makes me wonder if SANE will ever be supported out-of-box.
> 
> Dave Paules
> 

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