Hello, On Aug 24 11:57 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (shortened): > I've summarised your concerns and forwarded them up the food chain. > From there they should hopefully make it to the people at EPSON who > decide (and pay for) what kind of work EPSON KOWA does on iscan.
Thanks a lot! We look forward to hearing from the decision makers at EPSON KOWA. > FWIW, personally I agree with most, if not all, of your opinions I would be happy if you tell me if you disagree with some of my opinions because I really want to learn about the obstacles. I think if we know the obstacles we will find a solution. Please note the details in http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/11/jsmeix_print-info-for-manufacturers.html for example: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux drivers ... must * have an open source code * be subject to a sufficiently free license ... * have a platform-independent source code Thus, we will be able to integrate it in our products ... Although this does not mean that we cannot integrate any proprietary software in our products, it does mean that we cannot do this regularly but only if it is interesting for us. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- If we added proprietary drivers which are limited to i386 compatible platforms we would have a lot of additional work regarding scanners. For example the setup tool, the documentation and our support and sales teams must be enhanced/trained regarding platform-dependance and the proprietary license. If EPSON KOWA would like to pay us for all those efforts we could of course include their proprietary drivers ;-) By the way: Are there problems to make platform-independent scanner drivers? Are the normal kernel device IO methods sufficient to make scanner drivers? I think for scanners which work via "libusb" this is o.k. and for SCSI even more but perhaps there are some weird scanners which require platform-specific stuff (e.g. timing problems)? Kind regards Johannes Meixner -- SUSE LINUX AG, Maxfeldstrasse 5 Mail: [email protected] 90409 Nuernberg, Germany WWW: http://www.suse.de/
