Hello,
On Mar 15 07:40 m. allan noah wrote (excerpt):
... we have seen time and again that your users will be better served by an open backend. If you keep the code closed, you will be unable to support users on fringe platforms
I think one cannot overemphasize that point! I would even say: If you keep the code closed, you will be unable to really support your users on any platform. Reason (here only for Linux because I only know about Linux): The advantage of a free software driver for a manufacturer is that he will receive comprehensive out-of-the-box support for his devices * in all Linux distributions that contain the SANE software * on all hardware platforms for which those Linux distributions are available * continuously also in new versions of that Linux distributions without extra expenses for the manufacturer because only a free software driver can be included in the SANE upstream source code tarball that is used by all Linux distributions to make the sane-backends software packages that the Linux distributions provide to their users. In short: With a free software driver you get out-of-the-box support for basically all Linux users. In contrast: With a non-free software driver you are totally on your own how you provide your non-free software to your users and how you keep your non-free software working on all those various Linux distributions over the time while arbitrary changes are continuously happening in the whole Linux world. In particular for openSUSE you may have a look at "Third-Party Scanner Drivers" at https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_Scanners Kind Regards Johannes Meixner -- SUSE LINUX GmbH - GF: Felix Imendoerffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton - HRB 21284 (AG Nuernberg) -- 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
