[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
