[sane-devel] New backends eSCL

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Thierry,

thierry at ordissimo.com writes:

> Le 2019-11-08 11:17, thierry at ordissimo.com a écrit:
>> Hello,
>> We present to you the beta version of the sane backend taking on board
>> the eSCL protocol.

Cool!

There have been several posts to the list mentioning support for eSCL,
IIRC.  Good to see there is continued interest in getting this to work.

>> the list of potentially scanned scanners is long:
>> Canon Pixma TS6260, Canon Pixma TS3150, ....
>> Nous l'avons mis dans la GPL3, idéalement, une fois terminé, nous
>> aimerions qu'il soit intégré à sane.
> Sorry :)
> We put it in the GPL3, ideally, once finished, we would like it to be
> integrated with sane.

As a FSF Associate Member, I'm glad to see you put this under the GPL3
and hope that actually means GPL version 3, or later :-)

>> https://gitlab.com/sane-escl/sane-escl

I had a look and noticed in the README that you developed the backend
while working at a company called ORDISSIMO.  In addition, I did not
find any copyright and license assignments in your sources.  This made
me wonder a bit about the legal status of the sane-escl project.

I would suggest you mention the copyright and license in every single
source file.  Something like

  Copyright (C) 2019  <name of copyright holder>

  SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later

As for the copyright holder, I am concerned that this may actually be
ORDISSIMO rather than you and that maybe ORDISSIMO does not want this
to be released under that license.  So please carefully clarify this
with ORDISSIMO before pushing any changes.

# I sincerely hope ORDISSIMO does want to release it under that license,
# though, if they are the copyright holder.

In case you yourself actually are the copyright holder, then, of course,
you are free to pick any license you like for *your* code.

# To clarify, the company I work at owns the copyright of any code I
# write at the office as a result of the work contract I have.  Any code
# that I write in my own time, indepently of and without reference to
# what I did at the office, is copyright me (or whomever I deem to be
# appropriate).

Now, as for integration with SANE, I'd welcome that.  As self-appointed
SANE Project Janitor, I would be able to help out with getting sane-escl
under the umbrella of the SANE Project, i.e. become a project in the
GitLab sane-project group.

An alternative would be to add the sane-escl sources to the backends
project but I'm not sure that that is the best way forward as that would
tie it to the sane-backend release cycle.  Perhaps frequent releases of
sane-escl, especially in the beginning(?), might benefit its exposure
and progress.

In addition, there may be license concerns when adding it to the
backends project as most, but not all, of its code has an exception to
the GPL that basically makes most backends LGPL.

Anyway, continue making the sane-escl backend better than it already is
(haven't tried it :-P) and please clarify the copyright and license of
its code.

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