Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian
Hi Torsten, Thank you for your feedback. I havesent your email to Olaf Meeuwissen, the Lead Developer for Image Scan! for Linux at EPSON Kowa. Please feel free to contact him if you have any related questions specific to iScan. Otherwise, I am always here to help. Best regards, Ms. Farideh Sherbaf Sr. Product EngineerEPSON Worldwide Developer Relations150 River Oaks Parkway, Suite #200San Jose, CA 95134Tel: 408-576-4135Fax: 408-474-0511E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]~~~ - Original Message - From: Torsten Landschoff To: Farideh Sherbaf Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org ; Ray Hsu ; Farideh Sherbaf Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 10:14 AM Subject: Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian Hi Farideh, On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 04:15:25PM -0700, Farideh Sherbaf wrote: Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Farideh Sherbaf and I am your contact for EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations for scanners and All-In-One (Multifunction) products. The EPSON Developer Relations Group would like to obtain your feedback on your support of scanners in the Linux environment. Let me add to Juliens opinion a note from a user of those scanner tools:I own an Epson 1640SU scanner with automatic document feeder. And it is really great to have it supported by Linux. With the scanimage toolwe wrote a script to scan our lecture notes and generate PDF files in notime - something we failed to implement with *cough* Windows.It really helps to have them archived in binary form instead of paper soa big thank you for making it possible by at least providing developmentinformation for your hardware.GreetingsTorsten
Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian
[Ob-lists: if replying publicly, please reply to -devel only] Farideh Sherbaf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Linux Developer and Distributor, Hi, Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Farideh Sherbaf and I am your contact for EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations for scanners and All-In-One (Multifunction) products. The EPSON Developer Relations Group would like to obtain your feedback on your support of scanners in the Linux environment. I am the maintainer of the SANE packages in the Debian distribution ; nice to see some communication from Epson Kowa ! SANE maintainer hat on Your prompt answers to the following questions are appreciated (Yes/No): 1. Do you include the SANE backend (scanner driver) within your Linux distribution package? Yes. This is a must-have for any Linux distribution that wants to be used on the desktop. 2. Which SANE frontends (applications) do you include within your Linux distribution package? The standard frontends from the SANE project are available (scanimage, scanadf, xscanimage, xcam, saned), along with XSane, QuiteInsane and Kooka. 3. Do you include Epson's Image Scan! for Linux? (Image Scan! for Linux is a graphical frontend for Epson scanners.) No. Although further explanation does not seem to be requested by your survey, let me explain why the Epson Kowa backend and frontend aren't included in Debian. To be included in the Debian distribution, a software basically needs to fulfill 2 conditions : - its license must be considered Free by Debian (see [1] for details) - somebody has to volunteer to maintain the packages The latter would probably be no problem for the Epson Kowa softwares if the former point was fulfilled. The Epson Kowa Public License that covers the distribution of the Epson Kowa softwares isn't Free ; it forbids reverse-engineering or any form of analysis of the binary-only modules that ship with the software. This is the first showstopper. The second one is that the source distribution ships binary-only modules, which makes it impossible to build the softwares for anything else than Linux/x86 ; in its latest release, Debian supports 11 hardware architectures, and portability is something very important for us. We have a special section in our archive for softwares that do not meet our requirements in terms of license, but are nonetheless freely redistributable and potentially useful to our users ; it's the non-free section. Should somebody be willing to maintain packages of the Epson Kowa softwares, they could be included in the non-free section. However, note that the non-free section isn't distributed on the release CDs. Now, apart from this, looking at my 6-months-old notes on the subject, it seems that the scanners supported by the Epson Kowa backend are already supported (to some point) by the regular SANE backends. The same applies to the frontend, with the powerful frontends already available. Again, my notes are somewhat dated by now, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this point. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Regards, JB. [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s2.1.1 -- Julien BLACHE - Debian GNU/Linux Developer - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Public key available on http://www.jblache.org - KeyID: F5D6 5169 GPG Fingerprint : 935A 79F1 C8B3 3521 FD62 7CC7 CD61 4FD7 F5D6 5169
Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian
Dear Matt, Thank you for responding to my email. I will use Julien as scanner contact person. However, if possible I appreciate if I could also obtain your signature info for our database. Best regards, Farideh - Original Message - From: Matt Zimmerman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Farideh Sherbaf [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: debian-project@lists.debian.org; debian-devel@lists.debian.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Ray Hsu [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Farideh Sherbaf [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 8:09 PM Subject: Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 04:15:25PM -0700, Farideh Sherbaf wrote: Dear Linux Developer and Distributor, Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Farideh Sherbaf and I am your contact for EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations for scanners and All-In-One (Multifunction) products. The EPSON Developer Relations Group would like to obtain your feedback on your support of scanners in the Linux environment. Your prompt answers to the following questions are appreciated (Yes/No): 1. Do you include the SANE backend (scanner driver) within your Linux distribution package? 2. Which SANE frontends (applications) do you include within your Linux distribution package? 3. Do you include Epson's Image Scan! for Linux? (Image Scan! for Linux is a graphical frontend for Epson scanners.) I have forwarded your request to the developer responsible for SANE in Debian, Julien BLACHE [EMAIL PROTECTED]. -- - mdz
Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian
Hi Farideh, On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 04:15:25PM -0700, Farideh Sherbaf wrote: Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Farideh Sherbaf and I am your contact for EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations for scanners and All-In-One (Multifunction) products. The EPSON Developer Relations Group would like to obtain your feedback on your support of scanners in the Linux environment. Let me add to Juliens opinion a note from a user of those scanner tools: I own an Epson 1640SU scanner with automatic document feeder. And it is really great to have it supported by Linux. With the scanimage tool we wrote a script to scan our lecture notes and generate PDF files in no time - something we failed to implement with *cough* Windows. It really helps to have them archived in binary form instead of paper so a big thank you for making it possible by at least providing development information for your hardware. Greetings Torsten pgpkbjU2OWNd6.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian
Dear Julien, Thank you for responding to my email. We understand the existing issues which you have explained below and to make this more clear is that EPSON Kowa handles the License agreement. We have nothing to do with the licensing agreement for the Image Scan! for Linux. We're sure that there are reasons behind it since Linux is an open source. However, if you are still interested and would like to discuss this further, please contact EPSON Kowa directly. We appreciate if you could cc: us on the communication between yourself and EPSON Kowa. It is indeed a pleasure getting to know you and please feel free to contact me at anytime. We will do our best to help. http://www.epkowa.co.jp/english/linux_e/lsd_dwn_e.html You may use the software subject to the three licenses below depending on configured module. GNU General Public License GNU Lesser General Public License EPSON KOWA Public License Best regards, Farideh Sherbaf (Ms.) Sr. Product Engineer EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations 150 River Oaks Parkway, Suite #200 San Jose, CA 95134 Tel: 408-576-4135 Fax: 408-474-0511 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~ - Original Message - From: Julien BLACHE [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Farideh Sherbaf [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: debian-project@lists.debian.org; debian-devel@lists.debian.org Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 3:05 AM Subject: Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian [Ob-lists: if replying publicly, please reply to -devel only] Farideh Sherbaf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Linux Developer and Distributor, Hi, Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Farideh Sherbaf and I am your contact for EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations for scanners and All-In-One (Multifunction) products. The EPSON Developer Relations Group would like to obtain your feedback on your support of scanners in the Linux environment. I am the maintainer of the SANE packages in the Debian distribution ; nice to see some communication from Epson Kowa ! SANE maintainer hat on Your prompt answers to the following questions are appreciated (Yes/No): 1. Do you include the SANE backend (scanner driver) within your Linux distribution package? Yes. This is a must-have for any Linux distribution that wants to be used on the desktop. 2. Which SANE frontends (applications) do you include within your Linux distribution package? The standard frontends from the SANE project are available (scanimage, scanadf, xscanimage, xcam, saned), along with XSane, QuiteInsane and Kooka. 3. Do you include Epson's Image Scan! for Linux? (Image Scan! for Linux is a graphical frontend for Epson scanners.) No. Although further explanation does not seem to be requested by your survey, let me explain why the Epson Kowa backend and frontend aren't included in Debian. To be included in the Debian distribution, a software basically needs to fulfill 2 conditions : - its license must be considered Free by Debian (see [1] for details) - somebody has to volunteer to maintain the packages The latter would probably be no problem for the Epson Kowa softwares if the former point was fulfilled. The Epson Kowa Public License that covers the distribution of the Epson Kowa softwares isn't Free ; it forbids reverse-engineering or any form of analysis of the binary-only modules that ship with the software. This is the first showstopper. The second one is that the source distribution ships binary-only modules, which makes it impossible to build the softwares for anything else than Linux/x86 ; in its latest release, Debian supports 11 hardware architectures, and portability is something very important for us. We have a special section in our archive for softwares that do not meet our requirements in terms of license, but are nonetheless freely redistributable and potentially useful to our users ; it's the non-free section. Should somebody be willing to maintain packages of the Epson Kowa softwares, they could be included in the non-free section. However, note that the non-free section isn't distributed on the release CDs. Now, apart from this, looking at my 6-months-old notes on the subject, it seems that the scanners supported by the Epson Kowa backend are already supported (to some point) by the regular SANE backends. The same applies to the frontend, with the powerful frontends already available. Again, my notes are somewhat dated by now, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this point. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Regards, JB. [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s2.1.1 -- Julien BLACHE - Debian GNU/Linux Developer - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Public key available on http://www.jblache.org - KeyID: F5D6 5169 GPG Fingerprint : 935A 79F1 C8B3 3521 FD62 7CC7 CD61 4FD7 F5D6 5169
Re: EPSON appreciates your feedback by June 30, '03 - Debian
On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 04:15:25PM -0700, Farideh Sherbaf wrote: Dear Linux Developer and Distributor, Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Farideh Sherbaf and I am your contact for EPSON Worldwide Developer Relations for scanners and All-In-One (Multifunction) products. The EPSON Developer Relations Group would like to obtain your feedback on your support of scanners in the Linux environment. Your prompt answers to the following questions are appreciated (Yes/No): 1. Do you include the SANE backend (scanner driver) within your Linux distribution package? 2. Which SANE frontends (applications) do you include within your Linux distribution package? 3. Do you include Epson's Image Scan! for Linux? (Image Scan! for Linux is a graphical frontend for Epson scanners.) I have forwarded your request to the developer responsible for SANE in Debian, Julien BLACHE [EMAIL PROTECTED]. -- - mdz
