[sane-devel] SANE backend epson2 and Epson Perfection V700 Photo

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Adolf Winterer <adolf.j.winterer at inn-salzach.de> writes:

> Hello Olaf,
>
> Am Montag, 17. März 2008 01:19 schrieb Olaf Meeuwissen:
>
>> Hope this helps,
>
> It helps a little bit. The question I have to answer is: If I
> purchase a V700 Photo, do I get a working device with the epson2
> backend or do I get an expensive, useless brick on my desk? I no
> longer accept proprietary software, there had been to many really
> bad experiences in the past and the situation did NOT improve.

You get a partially working device.  The Perfection V700 PHOTO does
NOT require any of the non-free libraries that are part of or can be
plugged into iscan.  What that means is that you can use the device
with any of the epson, epson2 and epkowa backends on any architecture
but you will have to use a free SANE frontend.  Our iscan frontend
will not work on any architecture other than i386 at the moment.

The device may not support all of the advertised capabilities and the
three backends will, unfortunately, show somewhat different coverage
of these capabilities.

> From your mail address I see that you are working for Avasys. In the
> hope that you have any influence inside Avasys or at least can relay
> this,

I will forward your concerns "up the food chain".

> please let me state:
>
> "Outside of Windows and MacOS, please move your support more to the
> open source side, for scanners this would be the SANE project. A
> binary driver is always cumbersome in an open source environment, be
> it Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris or others. A source file can be compiled
> on many platforms, i386, amd64, ppc or other. But with a binary file
> you are stuck very fast as it cannot be adapted or corrected. If
> Avasys lacks manpower, then at least be generous with openly
> available documentation and / or participate in the Linux Driver
> Project. Thank you."

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen             FLOSS Engineer -- EPSON AVASYS Corporation
FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/