hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[David Zeuthen]

(It's most probably this is needless to say, but these are my own points
of view and does not necessarily reflect those of my employer which is
Red Hat, Inc.).

On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 18:00 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 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
> 
>