I personally am of the opinion that Brother is in violation of our license. However, our license is not strictly GPL, and the differences were clearly not written by a lawyer. You could argue that we give some space for a company to steal our work, and keep it from their users. I vote with my money, and don't buy their products.
allan On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 11:21 AM, James A. Robinson <jim.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > > -- > sane-devel mailing list: sane-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org > http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sane-devel > Unsubscribe: Send mail with subject "unsubscribe your_password" > to sane-devel-requ...@lists.alioth.debian.org -- "well, I stand up next to a mountain- and I chop it down with the edge of my hand" -- sane-devel mailing list: sane-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sane-devel Unsubscribe: Send mail with subject "unsubscribe your_password" to sane-devel-requ...@lists.alioth.debian.org