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

Henning Meier-Geinitz henning@meier-geinitz.de
Fri, 9 Jul 2004 19:44:39 +0200


Hi,

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 12:12:16PM -0400, m. allan noah wrote:
> 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:

I'm not sure if these are real problems. While the manufacturers (or
anyone else) may want to have such features, the bigger reason is in
my opinion that the market share of non-windows systems is just to
small and "TWAIN simply works". Development is expensive...

> 1. sane spec is not complete, cause it does not support various 
> LEDs,

LEDs should be possible without trouble.

> buttons or sensors that the manufacturers believe add so much value 
> (and brand distinction) to their products.

If you really want Buttons are possible without violating the standard
(see other discussions).

> 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.

XSane can at least display a logo of the manufacturer :-)

Anyway, they could use xsane or any other frontend and modify it to their
needs. Well, they have to provide source but I don't think that's a
problem in this case.

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

That's true but I guess most companies haven't found out that this is
not only a disadvantage for their users but also for them.

If the manufacturers really disliked SANE so much I guess they would
just make their own "standard" on *nix.

By the way: What about vuescan? Is that software programmed in
cooperation with manufacturers? Do manufacturers provide vuescan on
their driver discs?

Bye,
  Henning