[sane-devel] Drive question

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 08:59:25AM +0800, Walker.Chen@microtek.com.tw wrote:
> My name is Walker Chen and I am a drive engineer.

Welcome!

> I have some question 
> about sane-devel and hope you can give me a hand.
> I have some drive on my hand and I have to make it could be executed by 
> xsane.

By "drive" you mean a scanner?

> But I don't have any idea about make it work by xsane and 
> which drive source should be built in the .so. Because of the my scanner 
> driver source is classified so I can't give you my scanner source code.

You can use the SANE standard and write binary-only (non open source)
backends. The standard itsself is public domain. Id on't recommend to
do this, however, as it will always cause trouble as the binaries only
run on one platform etc.

Other options:

Use a specification that describes all details of that scanner
including how to actually scan. Build a SANE backend based on this
spec. This way you won't need the original source.

If you don't have such a spec yet, ask someone to write such a spec
based on the code. SOmeone else can then write new code based on the
spec...

Pretty complicated. So the easiest way is to use the original code and
make sure that it can be GPLed. Keep in mind that for SANE you only
need the actual drive code, not the TWAIN application/GUI code.

There are examples of free software backends by scanner manufacturers,
e.g. Epson and Brother. These companies use binary-only libraries for
some code they think is really really confident but the remaing stuff
is open source. I don't like it but it's better than completely
closed.

If you can provide more info about which scanner you are talking and
what you want to do exactly maybe we can help better.

There is also some information for manufacturers here:
http://www.sane-project.org/manufacturers.html

Bye,
  Henning