11 Sep 2000 (updated 11 Sep 2000 at 04:56 UTC)
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It ended up being a busy weekend, not least because my dad
came up to visit.
Big progress on foomatic
happened this weekend. I blessed Till of Mandrake, and he
promptly entered execution data for all known Lexmark inkjet
drivers (!). Anyone with a Lexmark inkjet and the driver
already installed should give a foomatic interface a spin
and help us squash bugs.
I also blessed the pnm2ppa guy. He hasn't put in pnm2ppa
data yet, but he said he'd try.
Assorted optimizations happened to the stp-interfaces
foomatic bundle for gimp-print; Robert added me to the
sourceforge project, so that users can report foomatic/stp
bugs via the stp bug reporting thing there.
I have a free license quandry: I can't lay my hands on a
good free database license. The goal is for data files
(some of which are actually software themselves) computed
from my database to be usable in most any
way, by most any application free or nonfree. However,
users must be able to replace the data files with
new ones, regardless of the application. And users and
developers should submit changes back into the
Postgres "source" database, where the rest of the community
can benefit from them. I'd kind of like to make that a
must, but since it's difficult on a practical level
to distribute the source Postgres database, this sort of
devolves into a single-source/thou-shall-not-fork sort of
license, which isn't what I'm after. OTOH, making it a must
is the closest thing to the GPL's "thou shalt distribute the
source" clauses I can think of. If
anyone has any
suggestions or pointers for free database licensing, I'd
love to
hear.
I put in for a sourceforge project to host the foomatic
interface generating code and a bug reporter. Speaking of
Sourceforge, I got annoyed at the HP-and-VA
self-congratulatory Printing Foundry front page, so I
pencilled in a recommendation for Epson Styli (which are
of course the only inkjets that work properly with
free
software). I wonder if they'll leave it be; HP is paying
the bills over at VA, after all.
I'll be giving a presentation at the MFPA (multifunction
peripheral association-no, I'd never heard of it either) conference
in October. Or at least I plan to if I can get them to
send me the speaker registration form in something other
than Word. I've completed the
presentation; if anyone has anything to add, please
feel free to review this and make suggestions.
I intend to
represent the free software community at the conference, so
if any developers on SANE, hylafax/efax, parport, hpoj/mlc,
printer drivers, etc have any messages thay want me to
deliver to a roomful of engineering manager types at all the
usual companies, do tell...
Similarly, if any other free software people will be at this
thing, I'd love to meet up with you.