Re: How to get (DFSG-free) Brother drivers into Debian
On Mon 05 Oct 2015 at 11:37:05 +0200, Dominik George wrote:
> Hi there,
Hello Nik,
> 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?
You may want to look at #635157 to get an idea of how easy/difficult it
might be to package this software for Debian.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=635157
Regards,
Brian.
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