[sane-devel] Brother Scanners

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:35:42 -0400
| 
| Since Brother has released the brscan, brscan2 and brscan3 drivers under
| the GPL (
| http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_src.html#srccd_s),
| what is the procedure for getting these included in sane?

I don't see a reply to your message.  Here's a reply to a similar
message from some years ago.  Summary: Brother has not made a
sufficiently complete source code release.  And its licensing is
not useful either.  Brother makes it clear that this isn't an accident.

From: Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org>
Date: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:15:23 +0200
Subject: Re: [sane-devel] Brother has already provided source code for brother scanner backends, should they go to sane-backends?

Mark Farnell <mark.farnell at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

> Brother has already licensed their brother sane backend code to GPL,
> the backends are known as brscan1, brscan2 and brscan3:

GPL isn't enough, we need GPL + SANE exception.

> brscan and brscan2 code:
>
> http://www.brother.com/cgi-bin/agreement/agreement.cgi?dlfile=http://solutions.brother.com/Library/sol/printer/linux/rpmfiles/sane_source/brscan-src-0.2.4.tar.gz&lang=English_source

What a joke. This license agreement is not the GPL, in case you hadn't
noticed. The tarball contains binary-only crap that's supposed to be
released under the LGPL, except releasing only the final shared
library doesn't even begin to satisfy the LGPL.

That's a FAIL.

> brscan3 code:
>
> http://www.brother.com/cgi-bin/agreement/agreement.cgi?dlfile=http://solutions.brother.com/Library/sol/printer/linux/dlf/brscan3-src-0.2.6-1.tar.gz&lang=English_gpl

The situation is exactly the same for this one, except the online
license agreement is the GPL. Misleading at best.

FAIL, too.

> Would we be able to incorporate these backends into sane-backends?

Obviously not.

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169