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Re: [LUG] Turboprint - again.

 

Julian Hall wrote:
Hardware OEMs are in business to make money.  You could argue the
valid point that X OEM could give all the technical data to the Linux
community, drop driver/module development entirely and then save all
their development costs.  The Linux community would use the data to
produce working solutions for Linux.  Come to think of it they'd also
save whatever money they pay Microsoft for the privilege of getting
the data from them they need to write the drivers.

An important point that applies to a lot of devices is that many hardware OEMs know almost nothing about the core of their device, they have purchased a chip from another manufacture and often just stuck it on a board with a couple of other chips, often the chipset manufacture even supplies the basic windows driver and they just brand it. Its the chipset manufactures that have the data you need (data sheets etc) and these can sometimes be persuaded to give data sheets (and some are even publicly available). I have directly experienced *huge* success in this area with wireless network drivers where the chipset manufacture has directly supported linux bypassing the OEM's.

But this probably doesn't apply to products such as high resolution printers such as yours where Epson themselves would have commissioned custom chips to achieve the required results. But certainty for wireless chips, modem chips, scanner chips, TV chips, sound chips, video chips... this is often the case.

Regards

Robin



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