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How to get (DFSG-free) Brother drivers into Debian



Hi there,

after receiving the shocking news that my employer got a replacement printer 
that is not yet supported by Debian, I had a look at what options there are.

The printer is a Brother HL-L8250CDN and Brother is known to have excellent 
Linux support (apart from delivering very low-standard packages for Debian).

Getting the printer to work is a matter of downloading a .deb file and 
installing it.

However, I had a deeper look into this pckage, and other driver packages, and 
found them containing two things: a PPD file and a filter, the latter written 
in POSIX shell, and both being licensed under GPL version 2 or newer.

While the downloads on teh Brother website carry hints on the drivers being 
proprietary, the seperate files in the packages tell a different story and are 
clearly tagged with a DFSG-compatible license.

Getting all those drivers into Debian would now be a great thing. I thought 
about it and found several options:

 a) get them added to OpenPrinting's foomatic DB
 b) get them added to the brlaser package
 c) create a new package

I did not find any useful information on how to contribute to a), which would 
be my preferred solution.

So, dear Printign Team, would you be so kind as to give me a hint on how to 
proceed?

Cheers,
Nik

-- 
PGP-Fingerprint: 3C9D 54A4 7575 C026 FB17  FD26 B79A 3C16 A0C4 F296

Dominik George · Mobil: +49-151-61623918

Teckids e.V. · FrOSCon e.V. · OpenRheinRuhr e.V.
Fellowship of the FSFE · Piratenpartei Deutschland
Opencaching Deutschland e.V. · Debian Contributor

LPIC-3 Linux Enterprise Professional (Security)

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