I was wondering whether or not any of the developers here know the story behind the Brother scanner drivers? They offer a Debian package that identifies itself as GPL, and that claims it is based on sane-backends. When I asked them about getting ahold the source (I want to port it to ARM), I got the stock "thank you for choosing... unfortunately we cannot support all models..." answer.
I can't tell if that means that (a) they aren't really obligated to release their driver under the GPL, and mislabeled the Debian package as such. (b) they are obligated because they derived it from GPLed code, and are not following their obligations under that license. I did specifically mention the GPL confusion, but they didn't bother to address that point in their reply. The copyright file from the debian binary package http://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=pds6000_us_eu_as&os=128 says: Name : brother-pds-sane Version : 1.0.0 Release : 4 Architecture: amd64 Install Date: (not installed) Group : Applications/System Size : 14276902 License : GPL Signature : (none) Source RPM : brother-pds-sane-1.0.0-4.src.rpm Build Date : 2015年05月28日 (週四) 16時34分37秒 Build Host : Brother Relocations : (not relocatable) Packager : Brother Industries, Ltd. Vendor : Brother Industries, Ltd. Summary : SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner Description : SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner. It based on sane-backends, so we need install sane-backends package first.
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