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Re: brother printer/scanners



On 01/02/2017 07:25 AM, Brian wrote:
On Mon 02 Jan 2017 at 02:05:47 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:

On Monday 02 January 2017 00:51:11 Jape Person wrote:

On 01/01/2017 09:29 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

For a far less secure way than I do it.

For a far less secure way than you do what? Scanning? You're stating
that you know for a fact that using the WPA-secured wifi connection
between a smartphone and an applet on the smartphone for getting a
scan from an MFC is less secure than installing proprietary software
on your computer to accomplish the scan? Is that really what you're
stating? I wouldn't care to spend the time and energy that would be
required to prove the point one way or another.

Neither do I, and the choice of printers you use, or scanners, becomes
considerably more limited when you eliminate the linux drivers supplied
by the devices maker, and which I feel I bought as part of the deal when
I dropped my card on the counter to pay for the device.  That choice is
for you and I to make isn't it?  I did think for a spell that epson was

Debian doesn't force anyone down the path of installing or not
installing proprietry software so the choice is indeed up to the
user. The pragmatic view is as sustainable as the opposing view
until examining what is provided for your money. Your card has
got you a good printer but it comes with printing software which
hardly deserves the label "Linux" and which has resisted any
attempt to have the free portions packaged for Debian. To quote

 https://lists.debian.org/debian-printing/2016/12/msg00082.html

 > * Brother makes it really complicated by bundling various files in
 > various licenses in literally hundreds of different packages with lots
 > of overlap and no publicly accessible source repository;

The Brother drivers install in /opt for a start and assume everything
is located there. The cups wrapper isn't up to scratch and is supposed
to be run as root. Many PPDs are not distributed directly but embedded
in shell or C-shell scripts. Temporary printer filters are written.
64-bit drivers and drivers for other architectures do not exist. These
are some of the things we know about. What don't we know?

Finally, there is the matter of LPD. Isn't software based on it
abandoned? CUPS is the well-maintained printing system of choice; why
have proprietary LPD core drivers and a wrapper script to make them work
with CUPS?

Would you pay good money for printer drivers which are badly designed,
technically substandard and which come with little or no support? Your
card, your money, your choice.

Yup. I didn't want to use the Linux printer drivers provided by Brother any more than I wanted to keep the Windows / MacOS software CD that comes in the package. They're useless to me. I'm happy enough to see others use them, if that's what they really want. But my attitude is that I'm buying the hardware, not the weirdware that comes with it.

I wish that those of us in this community who would prefer FOSS drivers had a stronger voice with the manufacturers. I recently walked away from HP because I thought their increased use of proprietary blobs as driver plug-ins in hplip drivers was done in kind of a sneaky manner. (An unwary user might not notice that the EULA screen was not for free software.) I could have made the same small compromises in functionality with HP to avoid the blob that I have made with the Brother printer. But I got annoyed with the HP Web site.

In the end, voting with my dollars accomplished nothing for the FOSS community, because I simply couldn't find a functional equivalent that was free all the way. After a while I just got tired of the research and bought something that would work.

My only recourse was to write to both manufacturers to voice my opinion. Fat lot of good that will do. But maybe I just like tilting at windmills.



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