Another Printer Manufacturer with Open Source Driver – Brother Industries

One of my blog readers posted a feedback on my previous post regarding Hewlett Packard open source printer driver.

brother.jpeg

I dug around a little bit and found that Brother Industries, one of consumer printer and fax machine manufacturer seems to support Linux drivers by releasing GNU GPL drivers of its product.

Though I haven’t use any of Brother’s product, I heard many great reviews regarding its lasetjet printer (one of the review is from LiewCF about Brother HL-2070N which are sold in Malaysia).

This is a good news for an average computer user like me as it broadens my choice. I might consider getting Brothers laserjet too should I expand my businesses later (since HP Laser Printer cost a bomb to maintain).

Hardware vendors and manufacturers that releases free and open source drivers are not just doing the community a favor, they can have an advantage of attracting consumers to use their products regardless of their operating system choice.

[tags]printer,printers,opensource,gnu,gnu gpl,open source,laserjet,hp,officejet,linux[/tags]

3 Replies to “Another Printer Manufacturer with Open Source Driver – Brother Industries”

  1. Unfortunately the brother printer driver is not GPL’ed. The only part licensed under GNU GPL seems to be the CUPS wrapper – the lpr driver is under some sort of ‘brother open license’ which does not enforce distribution of source code.

    The sane source code is made available with additional source for the brother backends, which are supposed to be linked against static libraries – the whole code being made available under another sort of ‘brother open license’ (I wonder if this is legally possible, since, IIRC, sane is GPL’ed).

  2. Kebelakangan ni aku prefer HP lagi, sbb hassle free+service center dekat. Tapi aku suka download+install driver dari internet dibandingkan dengan CD. CD driver HP ada banyak ‘crapware’.

  3. office aku ada gune dua bijik printer brother HL 1430 .. stakat nih ok lah. cuma kuat makan tonner .. huhuhu…

    tapi member aku tak suggest beli brother nih . sebab kalau nak repair susah .dia yang kata. aku tak kata..

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