[sane-devel] Radiograph sensor driver in SANE?

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Tej,

Tej Shah writes:

> Hi, I reverse engineered some intraoral radiograph sensors (sensors
> dentists use to take your x-rays) and made a proof of concept driver that
> works! You can see the code here:
> https://gitlab.com/DesiOtaku/cleardental-usbtest
> (BTW: I am more than happy to completely re-write all the code as this was
> just a proof of concept)
>
> So right now, it is a stand alone program. However, I would like this kind
> of code to move more "upstream" fashion. As far as I know, I am the only
> one that worked on a Linux driver for these radiograph sensors.
>
> So my question is should this kind of driver belong to SANE or should it be
> its own separate project?
>
> A little bit more background information:
> [...]

I agree with Yury that a SANE backend for these kind of devices is well
within the scope of the SANE project.  The fact that it's a bit of a
niche device doesn't really matter.  As long as it is a raster image
acquisition device, whether virtual or not, I think it's within scope.

Whether any backend you come up with is material for sane-backends may
be a slightly different matter.  So far, all backends are implemented in
C only and have a license that is GPLv2 with a SANE specific exemption
more often than not.  I'm not sure whether that's a "hard" requirement
and/or whether we should rethink it but thought I'd mention it because
your code is Qt/C++ with a GPLv3 license.

Personally and with my SANE Project Janitor hat on, I'd advise LGPLv2 or
later for a sane-backends contribution.

# With that hat off, I'd heartily welcome GPLv3 or later :-) but a Qt
# dependency is probably a bit over the top for the code you published
# (although I can understand why one would use C++ ;-).

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
 GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13  F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9
 Support Free Software                        https://my.fsf.org/donate
 Join the Free Software Foundation              https://my.fsf.org/join