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The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 0:38 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216)
In reply to: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org) by pksings
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

One thing to note is that CUPS is produced by a company which also produces a proprietary product (ESP Print Pro) that (in a way) competes with CUPS. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the issues that Eric experienced are mysteriously solved with the proprietary version. (I'm not saying that they are solved, I'm just tinfoiling...)


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The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 1:27 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] (2 responses)

"...CUPS is produced by a company which also produces a proprietary product (ESP Print Pro).."

???

What about Linuxprinting.org ? where does it fit ?...

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 6:55 UTC (Fri) by gtaylor6 (guest, #19812) [Link] (1 responses)

LinuxPrinting.org? We're certainly not at all proprietary here, at
least if I understand your intended meaning properly...

As for where we fit in:

CUPS (and printing software in general) is heavily dependent on printer
metadata. CUPS only works pleasingly for printers which can be described
accurately as PostScript printers in a PPD file. For non-PostScript
printers, this can be a bit of a trick.

So, LP.org hosts the canonical collection of non-ps printer metadata, as
used by more or less every distribution. Among other things, there is
a PPD file generator, and a glue script to plug drivers into CUPS (these
two things are the most popular facet of Foomatic, whose exceptionally
nonobvious name I won't go into now ;).

As a handy side-effect, there is a set of semi-intolerable support
services: a smattering of documents, forums, a support database, etc.
The docs are a disaster, and the forums hit or miss, but the database
is quite popular.

Grant Taylor - founder, linuxprinting.org

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 17:01 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

Just an idea...

Since its "Linuxprinting" it could be a good idea to pass the foomatic engine to inside of kernel space... i mean only the lower driver engine that foomatic represents (with the "per printer driver" in userspace or ring 1 as an example), and not the rasterizers, filters or spoolers...

That would make another subsystem very close to a true split driver paradigma, as the USB subsystem and as ALSA, we could say... and IMHO a gain to print server implementations...

That could represent a small fork in the actual code base, but an added improvement to security, debugging... and specialy an added improvement in gray areas and confusion concerning the status of licence of the code...

...and who knows?, part of a really advanced Human Iinterface for Open-source software(printers need human interventin anyway).


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