hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 15:27 -0600, Bernard Johnson wrote:
> 1) HP provides free GPL software for controlling and printing with their
> printers.  100% opensource.  Yet we remove the menu entry because that
> would be advertising.  (And when I say 100% opensource, I mean there is
> code, not a binary firmware blob or such b.s.)

Now, if only HP would play nicely with the open source community and
_just_ provide only drivers instead of reinventing the wheel by

 - provide a system-wide daemon for handing device access; oh, how nice,
   this completely bypasses OS security measures; for example, as a user
   logged in via SSH I can access the scanner. I should actually file
   that as a security bug. Bad.

 - Oh, and it's hard to actually change this; it's not like HPLip
   provides an easy to read list of what devices should get changed
   to provide access to the console user. To e.g. generate udev rules
   or HAL fdi files. Bad.

 - Not only that; starting this daemon is completely useless unless you
   have HP hardware. We still start it for everyone so everyone have
   to suffer. That's bad.

 - Provide their own UI for using the device; just provide the drivers,
   thank you very much; we don't really need foreign tools to make this
   harder on the users. Bad.

 - Try reading the HPLip sources; they provide access to the card reader
   by using a user-space vfat driver! Oh yeah!

 - All the HP stuff, since there is a lot of it, pulls in Qt which is
   not desirable for e.g. live CD. For example, Jeremy just pulled hplip
   from the test3 live cd because it wouldn't fit [1]. Also python
   is pulled in although this is less controversial. Good stuff that
   OLPC is based on Python otherwise they would have a hard time
   using the HP drivers.

Instead, for example, HP should get their scanner drivers into the SANE
project. My personal opinion is that with HPLip, HP is paying lip
service to the Linux community by treating us  as if we were Windows
where this sort of "let's throw lots of vendor-specific tools and UI
crap at the user" is common.

HP: please try to be a good open source citizen. Give us drivers and
drivers only. We're not really interested in end-user programs that uses
libusb/vfat user space drivers for example. If you really want to
contribute to the UI, please start supporting the efforts going on in
the GNOME and KDE communities - for example GnomeScan could use more
help. Many thanks.

Btw, I'd love to be proven wrong and that one can actually build HPLip
so only drivers and no silly privilege-escalation system-wide daemon is
used. Hey, it's GPL, perhaps someone can just fork it until HP starts
getting it.

      David

[1] : 
http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=hosted/livecd;a=commitdiff;h=ac05753140cfc281852fde226ef985b6efb43e64