[sane-devel] SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner

[m. allan noah]

I personally am of the opinion that Brother is in violation of our
license. However, our license is not strictly GPL, and the differences
were clearly not written by a lawyer. You could argue that we give
some space for a company to steal our work, and keep it from their
users. I vote with my money, and don't buy their products.

allan

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 11:21 AM, James A. Robinson
<jim.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering whether or not any of the developers here know the
> story behind the Brother scanner drivers?   They offer a Debian
> package that identifies itself as GPL, and that claims it is based
> on sane-backends.    When I asked them about getting ahold the
> source (I want to port it to ARM), I got the stock "thank you for
> choosing...  unfortunately we cannot support all models..." answer.
>
> I can't tell if that means that
>
> (a) they aren't really obligated to release their driver under the
> GPL, and mislabeled the Debian package as such.
>
> (b) they are obligated because they derived it from GPLed code, and
> are not following their obligations under that license.
>
> I did specifically mention the GPL confusion, but they didn't
> bother to address that point in their reply.
>
> The copyright file from the debian binary package
> http://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=pds6000_us_eu_as&os=128
> says:
>
> Name : brother-pds-sane
> Version : 1.0.0
> Release : 4
> Architecture: amd64
> Install Date: (not installed)
> Group : Applications/System
> Size : 14276902
> License : GPL
> Signature : (none)
> Source RPM : brother-pds-sane-1.0.0-4.src.rpm
> Build Date : 2015年05月28日 (週四) 16時34分37秒
> Build Host : Brother
> Relocations : (not relocatable)
> Packager : Brother Industries, Ltd.
> Vendor : Brother Industries, Ltd.
> Summary : SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner
> Description :
> SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner. It based on sane-backends, so
> we need install sane-backends package first.
>
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