[Printing-summit] printer manufacturer roundtable

Hin-Tak Leung hintak_leung at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Oct 20 04:13:00 PDT 2006


--- Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote:

> Sorry for the late followup.  Been busy prepping slides ...
<snipped>
> EPSON AVASYS and SEIKO EPSON are separate entities.  SEIKO EPSON is
> our customer.  At the same time, SEIKO EPSON is a major shareholder
> in EPSON AVASYS.  Hence the inclusion of EPSON in the company name,
> I think.

Depending on whether AVASYS has another major non-SEIKO customer,
and also whether AVASYS has another shareholder with voting rights(?),
the term is probably "wholy/partly-owned independent/semi-independent
subsidiary" - it is quite common for big corporations with multiple areas 
of interests. (I had worked for such a subsidiary of British Telecom for 
a couple of years).

<snipped>
> FYI, PIPS Lite is now 100% GPL'd.  The older line of PIPS packages
> will continue to contain non-free bits, AFAIK.  Both provide drivers
> for EPSON inkjet printers and all-in-ones.

I know the decision probably have nothing to do with you personally...
My guess would be that PIPS Lite doesn't really offer any substantial 
advantage over 3rd party drivers (and also being rather late in the scene...)?
There have been a few 3rd party ESC/P drivers over the years (many 
in japanese-only web pages). And non-ESC/P based printers remain unsupported?

In a way this vendor behavior is worse than not releasing a driver at all.
Because the existence of a crippled vendor driver (i.e. one that
"print-something" or "scan-something", but offers substantially 
reduced functionality compared to the windows driver or drivers on a 
different platform) inhibits 3rd party efforts. - doing reverse-engineering 
is hard, and one might think that if one waits long enough the extra
functionalities would be included, but it seldomly does...

Hin-Tak

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com 




More information about the Printing-summit mailing list