Hello, On Oct 12 11:37 david wrote (shortened): > I think it is not unlikely that in 10 years most scanners > will be sold with a Linux driver in the box.
I agree. > So the question becomes what is the best way to help > manufactures supply a good driver. Make them aware of http://www.sane-project.org/manufacturers.html > We should be looking for a path that allows companies > a easy transition from closed x86 drivers to open source. It is not the biggest problem whether the driver is free software or proprietary software. If it is free software we can have it by default in the Linux distributions. If it is proprietary software we cannot have it by default in the Linux distributions but this does not mean that it cannot work well if it is well maintained by the authors (i.e. by the manufacturers). A good example of a (partially) proprietary driver software which is made in compliance to the standards is "Image Scan". Meanwhile the plain driver "epkowa" is free, see http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2005/09/jsmeix_scanner-setup-100.html "Free Image Scan driver software for testing:" The biggest problem is that many manufacturers love to make a big-and-fat-all-in-one-do-everything-stand-alone-solution instead of making only what they should make first of all: The plain driver (i.e. only the backend). There is no need to make a frontend. They can make a frontend which is in compliance to SANE if they like but first of all only a backend is needed. See for example regarding printers: http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/11/jsmeix_print-info-for-manufacturers.html "The Linux support of printers should not be realized by implementing an entirely new custom print system. It cannot work if diverse print systems would have to run concurrently on the same host when a print server for various printers should be set up." > And it looks like that transition will be via TWAIN 2.0. If I understand http://www.sane-project.org/intro.html correctly ("TWAIN does not separate the user-interface from the driver") and if this is not changed in TWAIN 2.0, you may be actually right that the manufacturers who love the big-and-fat-all-in-one-do-everything-stand-alone-solutions will prefer TWAIN. I fear that this may lead to a horrible mess when several scanners from different manufacturers should be used on the same computer by different users. Kind Regards Johannes Meixner -- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5 Mail: [email protected] 90409 Nuernberg, Germany WWW: http://www.suse.de/
