[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
On Sun, 2008-12-28 at 16:20 -0800, David Poole wrote: Sounds like you would be the kind of manufacturer to publish protocol specs, do you plan to do that, or have you done so? Me, personally, I'd love to be able to do that. I've talked with my managers and no go. As a previous poster mentioned, our business types consider our own protocol a strategic advantage. :/ I've been given permission to help SANE but I must have anything I do reviewed by management first. I guess that is much better than the situation with other scanners, thanks for that. This precedent and pressure from HP/Canon etc might then be used to get other scanner OEMs to do similar and or employ developers to work on the SANE project, adding drivers before their scanners are released. We're a very tiny part of the market. We don't have any products labeled as our own. We co-develop low cost mono laser MFPs with HP. The HP LaserJet M1005 (vid=0x3b17) and M1120 (vid=0x5617 and vid=0x5717) are ours. There's another one (vid=0x5817) but I can't remember the official product name (ADF + Fax). I actually discussed this USB scanner class idea with Bdale Garbee (HP OSS Linux CTO) on the bus back from DebConf. Are there any other SANE scanner OEMs? (pun intended) PS: thanks a lot for the information you've provided. -- bye, pabs http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/ -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 197 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20081229/63aa55e4/attachment.pgp
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
Sounds like you would be the kind of manufacturer to publish protocol specs, do you plan to do that, or have you done so? Me, personally, I'd love to be able to do that. I've talked with my managers and no go. As a previous poster mentioned, our business types consider our own protocol a strategic advantage. That's the usual moot argument, served by nv and ati, which each have their own army of people to RE each other's device before they are even on the market. It only impairs the fair rights of using the device of people using alternative OSes. http://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2008-11-03/say_what_you_want_from_us_but_not_what_we_dont_want_to_hear_or_how_much_did_we_regress _did_we_regress It's really sad to see companies acting like this just because they see others doing so and don't think by themselves. Hopefully someday someone will find a legal loophole to force disclosure of what is just the user's manual. :^) Fran?ois.
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
2008/12/28 David Poole dpoole at marvell.com: Sounds like you would be the kind of manufacturer to publish protocol specs, do you plan to do that, or have you done so? Me, personally, I'd love to be able to do that. I've talked with my managers and no go. As a previous poster mentioned, our business types consider our own protocol a strategic advantage. I've been given permission to help SANE but I must have anything I do reviewed by management first. Are you managers aware that your protocol was already reverse engineered? http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-cvs.html#S-HPLJM1005 I have had this same discussion with three different OEM's lately, and got three completely different responses: The first gave me full protocol specs and access to hardware without any legal formalities at all. The second made me sign an NDA, but lets me talk to engineers, and lets me give away the code. The third gives me nothing. The outcome for all three was the same. I wrote a sane backend for each, one was just a little harder because I had to reverse engineer the thing. There is, however, one crucial difference: when people ask me what brand of scanner to buy, I don't hesitate to suggest the two companies that were helpful, primarily because the backend performs better due to full specs, but also as a payback to them for sticking their collective necks out. +1. The growing market of geeks/FOSS fans can still make a difference. Your situation with HP may cloud the IP waters here, but I would suggest to your managers that they are merely reducing the value of their advantage by locking it away. Yes it's really despering. Fran?ois.
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
Bah. Any pointers on that? I haven't been able to find anything on the intartubes about such a class yet. http://www.usb.org/developers/defined_class/#BaseClass06h www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usb_still_img10.pdf When we were developing our scanners, we looked into the USB still imaging device. The spec is huge and, IIRC, parts of it require paying for (PIMA15740? ISO15740? I can't remember). We decided to come up with our own because it was faster, easier, there was no real standard anyway, and we could test both ends in-house. With our own protocol, we could do our own testing and not worry about testing interoperability with 'N' different stacks. I'm not saying creating our own protocol was a perfect solution. It was the best solution we had at the time. But we did try to make it easy to reverse engineer. -Original Message- From: sane-devel-bounces+dpoole=marvell@lists.alioth.debian.org on behalf of Paul Wise Sent: Sun 12/28/2008 4:04 PM To: sane-devel Subject: Re: [sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class? [Please CC me in all replies] On Sun, 2008-12-28 at 10:23 +0100, Julien BLACHE wrote: Paul Wise pabs3 at bonedaddy.net wrote: The way to do this would be to define some USB protocol and have it standardised by the USB Implementers Forum, then use that to influence the OEM scanner manufacturers to implement it on new scanners. There actually was a scanner/imaging device standard class defined for USB, and it never went anywhere. Bah. Any pointers on that? I haven't been able to find anything on the intartubes about such a class yet. I would propose that the SANE network protocol be ported to USB (so that You'd better start from scratch and design a real protocol that doesn't have all the suckiness and limitations the current SANE network protocol has. Fair enough. -- bye, pabs http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20081228/05c179a8/attachment.htm
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
Sounds like you would be the kind of manufacturer to publish protocol specs, do you plan to do that, or have you done so? Me, personally, I'd love to be able to do that. I've talked with my managers and no go. As a previous poster mentioned, our business types consider our own protocol a strategic advantage. I've been given permission to help SANE but I must have anything I do reviewed by management first. This precedent and pressure from HP/Canon etc might then be used to get other scanner OEMs to do similar and or employ developers to work on the SANE project, adding drivers before their scanners are released. We're a very tiny part of the market. We don't have any products labeled as our own. We co-develop low cost mono laser MFPs with HP. The HP LaserJet M1005 (vid=0x3b17) and M1120 (vid=0x5617 and vid=0x5717) are ours. There's another one (vid=0x5817) but I can't remember the official product name (ADF + Fax). -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20081228/0adf4b15/attachment.htm
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
2008/12/28 David Poole dpoole at marvell.com: Sounds like you would be the kind of manufacturer to publish protocol specs, do you plan to do that, or have you done so? Me, personally, I'd love to be able to do that. I've talked with my managers and no go. As a previous poster mentioned, our business types consider our own protocol a strategic advantage. I've been given permission to help SANE but I must have anything I do reviewed by management first. Are you managers aware that your protocol was already reverse engineered? http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-cvs.html#S-HPLJM1005 I have had this same discussion with three different OEM's lately, and got three completely different responses: The first gave me full protocol specs and access to hardware without any legal formalities at all. The second made me sign an NDA, but lets me talk to engineers, and lets me give away the code. The third gives me nothing. The outcome for all three was the same. I wrote a sane backend for each, one was just a little harder because I had to reverse engineer the thing. There is, however, one crucial difference: when people ask me what brand of scanner to buy, I don't hesitate to suggest the two companies that were helpful, primarily because the backend performs better due to full specs, but also as a payback to them for sticking their collective necks out. Your situation with HP may cloud the IP waters here, but I would suggest to your managers that they are merely reducing the value of their advantage by locking it away. allan -- The truth is an offense, but not a sin
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
Are you managers aware that your protocol was already reverse engineered? http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-cvs.html#S-HPLJM1005 Yup, I've pointed that out. Didn't help. I'm still working on the Powers That Be but we have a lot of institutional inertia. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20081228/ecc37e99/attachment-0001.htm
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
and does hp/marvel make scanning software for osx? allan On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 8:25 PM, David Poole dpoole at marvell.com wrote: Are you managers aware that your protocol was already reverse engineered? http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-cvs.html#S-HPLJM1005 Yup, I've pointed that out. Didn't help. I'm still working on the Powers That Be but we have a lot of institutional inertia. -- The truth is an offense, but not a sin
[sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class?
Yup. We have a TWAIN and a standalone driver for OSX. IIRC, TWAIN has some problems with 10.5 but works with older OSX. (10.5 is on my wishlist to investigate.) -Original Message- From: m. allan noah [mailto:kitno...@gmail.com] Sent: Sun 12/28/2008 6:35 PM To: David Poole Cc: Paul Wise; sane-devel Subject: Re: [sane-devel] SANE protocol over USB as new USB scannerdevice class? and does hp/marvel make scanning software for osx? allan On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 8:25 PM, David Poole dpoole at marvell.com wrote: Are you managers aware that your protocol was already reverse engineered? http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-cvs.html#S-HPLJM1005 Yup, I've pointed that out. Didn't help. I'm still working on the Powers That Be but we have a lot of institutional inertia. -- The truth is an offense, but not a sin -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20081228/6752bea2/attachment.htm
