On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Martin Rehn <martinrehn at inbox.com> wrote: > Hello, > > This is a newbie question. I'm looking for some insight into why some of the > Avasys/epkowa drivers for Epson rely on a proprietary and binary-only > plug-in, while many others do not? Are there particular chipsets that have > restrictions, preventing Epson from releasing free drivers? What exactly is > the non-free portion of the driver doing; is that essentially the entire > driver or just a small part? Is there any will on the part of Epson to free > any of those drivers? Anyone else here who is working on free replacements? > I'll pose the question in generic terms for now, though I realize that the > answer would likely have to be broken down by model.
only Olaf can answer these questions i am afraid. > > My question boils down to asking whether the Epsons with non-free drivers > should be avoided or not, given that I would be fine with using a non-free > driver for the moment, but would rather not be bound to it in the long run. > I would be willing to do my part to reverse-engineer and replace the non-free > part of the driver if that would be more or less straightforward. (I have not > yet bought a scanner, but in my area it seems hard to get by any model that > does what I want, and that also has open source drivers, at a reasonable > price -- and that's true not only for the Epsons.) i think there is a (slowly) building momentum to reverse engineer these machines and provide a fully free backend. it just needs someone with time and energy to start the ball rolling. perhaps that is you? allan -- "The truth is an offense, but not a sin"
