[sane-devel] Brother scanner drivers

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 04:55:38AM -0800, Yves Van Belle wrote:
> I have seen that the Brother scanner drivers are GPLed. The
> drivers can be found here:
> 
> http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/sane_drivers.html
> 
> If you take the source file and read the copying file you will
> see the drivers are GPLed. It would be nice to have these
> incorporated in the SANE backend. I don't have the knowledge to
> do this, but if someone of the SANE developers could do this,
> this would be great.

Only part of it is GPLed. As far as can see there are binary-only
libraries. And these have this License (for full details, see the
package):

2.  Brother grants User a non-exclusive license:

[...]
    (2) With respect to the Software distributed in binary code or executable
        code form:
	a. To reproduce and distribute (via Internet or in any other manner)
           the Software.
        *  User shall not have any rights to modify, alter, translate or 
	   otherwise prepare derivative works of the Software if and when the
	   same is distributed in binary code or executable code form:
	   provided, however, that Brother permits User to modify such
	   Software only for User's own use and reverse engineering
	   only for debugging such modifications, to the extent such
	   permission is required under GNU Lesser General Public
	   License (ver. 2.1 or later).

So it's not possible to include it into the sane distribution.

Even if it were completely GPLed (or better yet, GPL + SANE
exception), the code would need severe checking and maybe
restructuring. At least thst's my first impression. Lots of Chinese?
"//" comments, completely wrong comments on the top of the file
(talking about the dll and sm3600 backend). And it would need a
maintainer who is able to do testing and make sure that this is not
Linux-only code.

Bye,
  Henning