29 Jul 2000 raph   » (Master)

I just got back from visiting Transmeta and attending the VA Printing Summit. For a good picture of the latter, read Grant Taylor's excellent notes.

Kudos to VA for organizing the event, and in style. It's always a great service to bring a number of passionate hackers together to work on free software, and even nicer when done in style - a nice hotel, good food, good discussion rooms, etc.

One of the interesting aspects of the summit is the way it brought together people from disparate communities (that's what "summit" means, I guess).

The speaker for the HP presentation explained that since they wanted "great Linux printing", they naturally went to VA Linux (Nasdaq: LNUX). Ok, so they didn't quote the ticker symbol, but it was clear that their thinking was business-to-business. Yet, after many months of work by a number of talented hackers, the results aren't that impressive. Yes, there is quite a bunch of code now for print spooling scripts, GUI config tools, libraries to deal with some of the low-level detritus that inhabits printer space, etc., but almost none of that is shipping with distros or particularly well integrated with other projects.

Part of the explanation, I think, is that HP's goals are somewhat different than those of the free software community. Our goal is not "great Linux printing", it's printing that doesn't suck.

To me, one of the high points of the summit was the vendor relations breakout session. It's clear that most printer manufacturers want to support Linux well, but just don't understand very well how to do it. After all, their business is making printers and selling ink, not acting as an arm of the Borg. So a lot of time was taken up (very productively, I think) thoughtfully explaining how our development processes work, answering questions, and going deeper into some of the more subtle points. I think it would be interesting to distill and bottle the discussion we had. In the meantime, support for inkjet printers benefits.

The summit really highlighted for me how we're not just forming a community, we're developing a complete culture around what we do. From this culture flows the way we make decisions, manage change control, cooperate intensely even as we compete, and our passionate, complex, subtle and certainly not homogenous attitudes towards intellectual property. And all of this is wildly different than in the proprietary software world.

More down to earth, the IBM Omni driver sure looks interesting. Basically, they're taking the printer driver library from OS/2 and releasing them as free software. It appears to be a clean, modular design, and obviously a huge amount of testing and development with real printers went into it.

I was also amazed at the rapid rate of progress that the Gimp-Print project has been making. I'd say those drivers are now roughly on par with Epson's, certainly in some ways noticeably better. Robert Krawitz and I are both eager to integrate Even Toned Screening, which should hopefully improve quality even more.

A few more quickies. kuro5hin, really sorry to see what assholes have done to your site. I eagerly look forward to its return. matt, you raise a lot of good points. The trust metric tries its best, but the accuracy of rankings is clearly limited by the quality of data going in. People, read the cert guidelines. Just using free software is not enough to earn a cert - you have to actually contribute something back. Not that there's anything wrong with using free software (I'm sure that's how we recruit nearly all of our developers), but that's just not what this site is about.

Word up to all the homies I've been spending time with in the last few days. I do greatly enjoy the real human contact.

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