[sane-devel] SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner

[James A. Robinson]

I was wondering whether or not any of the developers here know the
story behind the Brother scanner drivers?   They offer a Debian
package that identifies itself as GPL, and that claims it is based
on sane-backends.    When I asked them about getting ahold the
source (I want to port it to ARM), I got the stock "thank you for
choosing...  unfortunately we cannot support all models..." answer.

I can't tell if that means that

(a) they aren't really obligated to release their driver under the
GPL, and mislabeled the Debian package as such.

(b) they are obligated because they derived it from GPLed code, and
are not following their obligations under that license.

I did specifically mention the GPL confusion, but they didn't
bother to address that point in their reply.

The copyright file from the debian binary package
http://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=pds6000_us_eu_as&os=128
 says:

Name : brother-pds-sane
Version : 1.0.0
Release : 4
Architecture: amd64
Install Date: (not installed)
Group : Applications/System
Size : 14276902
License : GPL
Signature : (none)
Source RPM : brother-pds-sane-1.0.0-4.src.rpm
Build Date : 2015年05月28日 (週四) 16時34分37秒
Build Host : Brother
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : Brother Industries, Ltd.
Vendor : Brother Industries, Ltd.
Summary : SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner
Description :
SANE-Backend for Brother PDS-series scanner. It based on sane-backends, so
we need install sane-backends package first.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20160916/b320aff3/attachment.html>