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

[m. allan noah]

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, David Stevenson wrote:

> 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....

sure, sure. i got no problem with someone acting as a liason to hardware 
vendors. i do this myself with fujitsu.

> > 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.

sure, and none of us ever had the time to actually formallize the 
proposal, let alone get input from manuf.

> > 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.

a plethora of front-ends is not a problem, but it does defeat some of the 
point for the vendor who is also making a backend.

> > 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.

because experience shows that they will be, esp. in the cheaper hardware 
segments, where the vendors are likely to cross-license tech from each 
other (think winmodems).

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

i can say that some vendors, (fujitsu) have been quite talkative about 
their products, and i have specs for many of them, without signing NDA, 
and whatever code i write is at no cost to them or you, and under the GPL. 
seeing more of that would be great.

allan

-- 
"so don't tell us it can't be done, putting down what you don't know.
money isn't our god, integrity will free our souls" - Max Cavalera