Hi, Brian Potkin writes:
> On Wed, 22 Apr 2020 at 16:34, Ralph Little <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hi, >> HP and Epson provide pretty decent Linux support for many of their >> machines, and while binary only drivers, that's pretty sweet. > > AFAIK, you are correct about Epson scanner drivers; they are binary-only. Eh, sorry but that's incorrect. Source code is available from https://support.epson.net/linux/src/scanner/ for three kinds of "drivers", two of which I've worked on for a combined total of 15 years (until 2015). I just pulled the tarballs and checked to make sure things haven't changed in the meantime. For iscan-2.30.4, which includes the epkowa backend, the README states This software is primarily covered by the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later) with exceptions that allow for the use of several non-free plugins. The graphical user interface, iscan, carries an exception to allow linking with the non-free 'esmod' library. Copies of that library are included in the 'non-free/' directory and covered by the terms of the EPSON END USER SOFTWARE LICENSE. The device driver (backend) carries a similar exception to provide for the use of plugins. Such plugins are packaged and distributed independently from this software and are only required for certain models and/or hardware options. For imagescan-3.62.0, aka utsushi-0.62.0, which includes the utsushi backend, the README says This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or at your option any later version. A copy of this license can be found in the 'COPYING' file. The epsonscan2 software, which I only just found out about(!), has the same blurb in its README. Not sure if it includes a SANE backend. What is true about binary-only is that some models and/or some of a model's functionality needs a non-free plugin. This is true for the network support (but epson2 covers that quite well too, I believe) and for those devices that need an interpreter. The epkowa.desc files does a pretty good job of identifying those. # Sorry for the long follow-up, but while working on the first two, I # actually lobbied a fair bit for keeping as much as possible of these # drivers Free Software. As a result, the epkowa backend now works # without the plugins and the utsushi backend is GPL-3.0-or-later # *without* exceptions. All interfacing with non-free code is done at # what the FSF calls "arm's length", via IPC/RPC. 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
