[sane-devel] Please give me some help to solve the license issues in using sane

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

On Sun, 8 Jun 2008, m. allan noah wrote:

> On 6/8/08, kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu
> <kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu> wrote:

[...]

> Canon is a very big company, where one hand may not know what another
> hand is doing. I personally have spent the last couple of years
> negotiating an NDA with Canon USA to get docs for the DR series
> machines. I would not be surprised if Wang Mengqiang is talking about
> an entirely different line of scanners, and has no idea that such
> negotiations are happening.

Interesting. Any luck?

This is along similar lines to what Greg K-H was proposing for kernel 
driver development. It seems to me that this is what some of those 
companies really ought to be doing. Reason: If they do this, then some of 
us might be willing to write open-source GPL or LGPL code (in accord with 
the existing license of whatever project it is) which incorporates the 
full functionality, but does not provide any explanation of how things 
work except to the incredibly persevering. Then the functionality would 
be embodied in open code, but the code itself would not be so easy to 
understand except by someone who knows what it is about. At least, that is 
what I imagine would be the outcome of such an NDA.

The alternative to such cooperation, I would think, is worse for those 
companies in the long run, as far as keeping their "secrets" is 
concerned. For, someone who has learned those "secrets" simply by figuring 
them out is not under any obligation at all to the hardware maker and 
usually, after all that hard work, feels no obligation either.

Well, we have to continue to educate them, it seems :)

Theodore Kilgore