Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> writes: > Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> wrote: >> For example the epkowa driver from IScan is free software. > > No, epkowa is not free software. A large part of the scanners it > supports actually rely on proprietary, binary-only protocol > interpreters shipped as Linux/i386 shared libraries.
The epkowa backend is free-as-in-freedom software. It is licensed under the terms of the GPL and carries an exception that allows for the use of non-free extensions. Of the 181 models (by market name) supported by the backend 35 require such a non-free extension. # Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of the recents models # requires one. > If you don't need to use such a scanner, then you don't need to bother > with epkowa, as your scanner is pretty much for sure supported by > either epson, epson2 or snapscan. Not claiming that the epkowa backend does a perfect job either, but at least the epson backend does not support a number of all-in-ones. Moreover, and in case you missed this, the epson backend is _not_ maintained anymore. BTW, many thanks for packaging the epkowa backend in libsane-extras for Debian ;-) but can you tell me why libsane has to depend on it? What breaks in libsane if I yank libsane-extras? # We're about to start providing Image Scan! for Linux .debs and this # is a bit of a show-stopper conflict ... Hope this helps, -- Olaf Meeuwissen FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS Corporation FSF Associate Member #1962 sign up at http://member.fsf.org/
