Re: [tlug] refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Benjamin Tayehanpour writes:

 > On 23 December 2013 01:24, Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> wrote:
 > > Ah well, at least these days printers aren't a complete mess of horrific
 > > proprietary software. Oh, wait...
 > 
 > It's not that bad, today. I get better printer support in GNU/Linux
 > than I do in Windows.

As of two years ago, that certainly wasn't true of the big Japanese
makers (Canon, Epson).  As you note, Epson's free drivers suck, and
Canon's are frequently non-existent.  Brother is cooperative, and HP
support has always been excellent, but the Epson/Canon hardware is
attractive and the price is right.

 > As long as one stays away from the very cheapest garbage around
 > (looking at you, Epson),

"Cheap garbage" *should* work.  Some of us can afford to buy better
stuff, but our students and friends who work for NPOs can't.  And I've
actually been quite happy with our Epson EP-804A (~16000 three years
ago IIRC) -- but I drive it with a Mac.  (Which is one reason why I
don't recommend 100% free software systems to the above-mentioned
"clients" any more.  Software freedom is an important property of the
ecosystem, but it's not the only freedom that matters.  Freedom from
driver hassles you don't want is another one.)

Aside: In my case, luxury is thanks to your taxes -- write to your
Diet member if you have one.  Academics waste *so* much of their grant
money on the "use it or lose it" principle.  IMHO Ren Ho had it wrong
-- it *is* important to be Number 1.  The right question is, "Are we
using the money in ways that will make Japan Number 1?"  The answer
is, "No!"

It's not that I don't want the money.  I do.  But I want to be able to
spend it, eg, by supporting grad students directly (so I can fire the
bitches if they go do arbeit instead of studying :-).

 > Furthermore, it's more common with printers connecting directly to
 > the network. GNU/Linux's got that corner covered a long time.

Not at all.  Protocols for pushing data across wires (or lack of them)
are not the problem.  It's that the manufacturers don't want to reveal
the actual command set for their hardware: they consider that
proprietary information.

I just spoke to L Peter Deutsch, and he touched on exactly this
subject.  He said that AFA he K it's still true, as funny as that may
seem.  Ghostscript is *still* making enough money to support his
retirement and ~10 developers "in style!" as Buzz Lightyear said.
(Nice house! is what I said.)  Entirely due to the fact that printer
and fax manufacturers *still* want to conceal their instruction sets
and actual hardware capabilities, so they are willing to pay not only
upfront for driver development, but also royalties for a non-GPL
license to Ghostscript itself.