[sane-devel] Scanner Manufacturer/Post SANE Drivers

[Ralph Little]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 10:57 AM Mike Hansen <ambirdev at outlook.com> wrote:

> Ambir Technology is a manufacturer of scanners and we would like to post a
> closed source SANE driver to your site for two of our scanners.   One of
> the major virtualization providers that uses Linux as a backbone of it’s
> system is requiring SANE drivers to be posted to your site.  We would
> appreciate instructions on how/where to post the drivers.
>

The only reference that we have to proprietary drivers is in this page,
where we provide links:
http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-external.html

We do not host proprietary drivers or binary blobs. I'm quite happy to add
links to your drivers on that page however.


>
> Also, we would be interested in providing SANE drivers for many of our
> other scanners.   If any SANE developers are interested, we would be
> interested in contracting you to develop the drivers.   We have the Linux
> drivers built out for x86/x64 and can provide the .so files.  Your work
> would involve building out the SANE interface.  In essence, the hardware
> layer is already built out as an SDK, you only need to interact with it and
> all of the USB/port/etc  calls are taken care of by the SDK.  You would
> simply be making calls to set DPI/Color/Simplex/Duplex/etc.  If you are
> interested in performing contract work in this area, feel free to reach out
> to us at this e-mail address.
>
>
>
If you are looking for the SANE Project to support a free/open source
frontend to a proprietary blob then I don't think that it is something that
we could provide from the project or host here. That's not to say that a
SANE developer wouldn't be interested on working on it for you. That would
be entirely up to them. The advantages of an open source backend of course
is that it can be built to support a variety of platforms and modified as
Linux distros (and BSD/Windows/AIX etc...) evolve over time to remain
functional. Many proprietary drivers have become unusable over time because
of this time-based rot. :(

I welcome scanner manufacturers reaching out to the project for
cooperation: we see so little of that of late. It's just a shame that many
still insist on closed-source blobs to be a component of them.

Just my personal opinion of course. Others may disagree.

Cheers,
Ralph
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