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

[David Stevenson]

m. allan noah wrote:
> 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.

But if someone was offering....
> 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.

Proposals to include this have been discussed, possibly input from a 
manufacture would help.
> 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.
> 
Or repackage existing - under GPL - is this a problem.
> 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.
> 
This is looking for problems, why assume they will be closed source.
> that said, there are a couple vendors who do make backends (brother comes 
> to mind).