Re: [Printing-user-general] Why has nothing changed?

In article 
<mailman.8.1153932116.5415.printing-user-general@lists.freestandards.org>, 
Glendon Gross <[email protected]> writes:

> Well, I recently bought a Okidata C3200 color laser. Windows printing 
> is excellent, and the vendor supplied driver works well under OS X. 
> After repeated failures to print to it from Suse Linux 8.2, even after
> installing the latest CUPS, I finally called Okidata for support. The 
> support technician from Okidata explained that their engineers were 
> able to write a driver for OS X, but don't have plans to release a 
> Linux driver.


The lack of a Linux driver made by Okidata for sure is not because it
is technically more challenging than a Linux driver for Mac OS X. It
is simply a business decision. For some reason they think it is not
beneficial (economically) to their company to invest time and money
into a Linux driver, while it seems to be when they cover OS X.
Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong.

Maybe someone has to tell them that when they already have an OS X
version, they also *also* have completed 90% of a Linux version.
(After all, CUPS was on Linux long before it came to Mac OS X, and
OS X is a Unix-based OS as well.)

Maybe someone has to address their "intellectual property" concerns:
their board of directors may still be under the impression that they
need to release all their drivers as OSS when they go for CUPS on
Linux. Maybe they don't know that they could plug in even a binary-only
driver into the CUPS system without getting in conflict with the
GPL....