hplip: hp-toolbox advertising?

[Bernard Johnson]

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

Well, I'm sure you're just emphatic about "better software" but I think
it comes across as looking a gift horse in the mouth.  I mean, what do
you want, junk the hp software and then I can have the same printing
capabilities as when I had this:
http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-LaserJet_3100

Where are your bug reports to them?  Your feature requests?  Have you
even interacted with the hplip guys before?

 >  - 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.

and so is:
  smartd when I don't have a smartd drive
  bluethooth when I don't have bluetooth
  etc

We have:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=222312

Unfortunately, AFAICS, this bug will only solve that for connected
devices.  What about devices like mine that are on the network?  How do
you know when to start/stop services then?  Are you suggesting that HP
upgrade all their printer firmwares with Rendezvous support?

It's what we have now [2].


>  - 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.

Oh? You have tools that work with their printers?  No.  Their job is to
take care of their customers, which they are doing (even with Linux!) by
providing software that works.  Every issues that I've reported to the
hplip guys has been dealt with in a timely manner (sans firmware issues
reported to another group).  That's a helluva lot more than I can say
about reporting bugs to RedHat/Fedora [1].

We are lucky that they are much more business savvy regarding opensource
than the idiots running the lightscribe group.  If you think hplip is
hard to swallow, download their lightscribe software and try not to
regurgitate.

And as far as complaining, bitching, moaning about HP not being "good
opensource citizens"...

How far as that gotten you with things like Broadcom wireless firmware?
 Oh, you're still loading binary blobs.  Gotcha.

It's nice to sit in your tower and throw rocks, but end then end, some
of us work with these products and are held accountable for things
working or not, no matter what political or idealogical happenings go on
at Fedora/Red Hat.

What next, tell me to use Ubuntu?


[1] I am generally very happy with Fedora progress, I just have to keep
reminding myself "everything takes time" :)

[2] Reminds me of when I showed a friend of mine a copy of Linux (fit on
two floppies, no login support etc) and was telling him how cool it was.
 His response was "it looks like it sucks pretty bad to me". :(