[sane-devel] how to configure/scan with an Epson Xp-4100 printer/scanner

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Alexander,

Alexander Pevzner writes:

> Regarding Epson's imagescan, it is very unlikely that its USB version
> will work together with the IPP over USB daemon running; they will not
> be able to share USB interface. Basically, for devices like yours,
> open source alternatives work more reliable, that proprietary drivers,
> but may expose less hardware features, so don't use imagescan unless
> you really need.

I wish to point out that the USB device protocol support in imagescan is
*not* proprietary.  In fact, it is licensed under the GPL, version 3 or,
at your option any later version, and if you care to browse the source,
you'll find that there is plenty of protocol related documentation.

# I ought to know.  I wrote over 95% of it and lobbied hard to get it
# released under that license.

That said, the imagescan "packages" that EPSON distributes come with
proprietary, closed source, non-free extensions that add support for
a network version of the device protocol and OCR.

If you don't need the network support and are fine with Tesseract for
OCR, imagescan is Free as in Freedom software.  IIRC, the README in
those packages actually makes a point of these extensions or plugins
being *optional* (at the possible expense of network support).

# BTW, the epson2 and epsonds backends have implemented the network
# related bits of that protocol to some extent.  From what I remember,
# epson2 is functional, epsonds still needs work.

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