Re: Pirates and Counterfeiters of Epson Ink Cartridges

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>]

   From: "Bruce Roorda" <possum1@softhome.net>
   Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 12:27:30 -0600

   Beyond that, for the system to work, people like us *must* take the
   rest of the intellectual output of companies like Epson and try to
   put it to good use.  If someone can discover a way to do something
   that doesn't infringe the patent, he should.  If someone can
   discover a trade secret by honest means, he should.

I guess I have to absolutely agree with this.

First, just in case there's any confusion, I have no issue with
Epson.  Epson has in fact been very friendly toward the Gimp-print
project; they recognize that our efforts only increase the market for
Epson printers, and that's only to their benefit.  By and large, I
think of them as good guys.

Does Epson deserve respect for their printers?  Yup.  Should you buy
their ink, if you think it's the best, or the most cost-effective, or
you believe that supporting Epson is the way to go?  Certainly.  Does
Epson have a right to dictate what you may do with a printer, once you
buy it?  Nope.

Progress is almost always incremental.  Somebody discovers a new and
better way of doing something, and now it's someone else's turn to
catch up.

In the free software and open source world, all of this is completely
visible and nobody questions this.  Linus Torvalds may have written
the first Linux kernel, and he currently leads the effort (only
because people let him), but many of the top Linux kernel hackers
maintain their own source trees, and a lot of people use those.  If
one of those eventually becomes more popular than Linus's tree, well,
then Linus either has to adapt or somebody else is going to be the
chief maintainer.  In fact, one of the measures of how valuable a
project is is how many other people take pieces of it and use it
elsewhere.  Maybe somebody else will do a better job with printer
drivers than we're doing on Gimp-print, and maybe that code will even
be based on ours, and we'll be the ones joining their project, or
trying to do better, or gracefully pulling out and letting somebody
else do a better job.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print/stp --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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