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

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Allan,

I just dashed off a rather long explation to James and the list.

m. allan noah writes:

> 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.

The sane-backends source code contains files that are GPL and some that
are GPL with an exception.  The exception is similar in spirit to what
the LGPL allows and was, IIRC, added before (or around) the LGPL was
introduced.  As long as they only used GPL with exception code (based on
library symbols, I they did), there isn't really anything you can object
to (unless you also object to using LGPL'd code ;-).

Personally, I wished that more of the sane-backends code is GPL, making
it harder for folks to take what we share without sharing back.

> I vote with my money, and don't buy their products.

In addition, I'd point out their mistakes, publicly ;-)

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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