Include Brother scanner drivers

Apparently these drivers have licensing problems that prevent them from being included in sane and probably ubuntu's sane-backends packages as well. See http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2005-December/015707.html for details.

I just mailed to Brother and asked them for a statment concerning the license situation - hope to here from them soon.

The questionable paragraph:
=====
Brother grants User a non-exclusive license: to reproduce and distribute (via Internet or in any other manner) the Software. User shall not have any rights to modify, alter, translate or otherwise prepare derivative works of the Software: provided, however, that Brother permits User to modify the Software only for User's own use and reverse engineering only for debugging such modifications, to the extent such permission is required under GNU Lesser General Public License (ver. 2.1 or later).

from: http://www.brother.com/cgi-bin/agreement/agreement.cgi?dlfile=http://solutions.brother.com/Library/sol/printer/linux/rpmfiles/sane_others/64bit/brscan2-0.2.2-0.x86_64.rpm&lang=English_sane

I just recieved a Mail from a guy working @brother. The driver ist mostly under GPL - but some parts are excepted ... seems to be one of this _evil_ blob-things.

The driver ist mostly under LGPL 2.1 ...

Just received another email from the japanese brother guys.

Because of my request, they changed the license agreement.

http://www.brother.com/cgi-bin/agreement/agreement.cgi?dlfile=http://solutions.brother.com/Library/sol/printer/linux/rpmfiles/sane_debian/brscan2-0.2.1-0.i386.deb&lang=English_sane

I do not think this makes a difference, (eventhough we are now allowed to redistribut the whole driver) since we still are confronted with a partial binary driver.

Any driver guy should take a brief look onto this and then reject or confirm the request ;).

Even if the driver is not included because of licensing issues, you can at least make it easier to manually install the driver by adding the proper udev rules. For me, this is

# Brother DCP-115
SYSFS{idVendor}=="04f9", SYSFS{idProduct}=="018c", MODE="664", GROUP="scanner"

[Expired for sane-backends-extras (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Brother put forth the effort they thought they needed to to get their hardware working under linux based operating systems. If we're going to disregard said effort, we owe them an explanation and a clear request as to what more we need from them. It seems they're rather responsive. :)

As an end user, I rely on the binary nVidia driver already. I'm not going to switch operating systems. I'm not going to switch scanners. Users will do what they need to do, and the stated objective of the sane project is to make scanner access easy. The driver code may be butt ugly, but as long as that code doesn't put other scanner drivers that are already part of sane at risk also, I don't see how including those drivers can make anything any worse. The sooner they're pulled, the sooner the code can be brought up to project standards.

Assuming, though, that you can't ship the actual driver, please at least ship udev rules, as per Thomas' request.
Thomas : how do you find what udev rules to use with your scanner? I may be able to run xsane with user permissions if I can at least get that all figured out..

> Thomas : how do you find what udev rules to use with your scanner? I may be able to run xsane with user permissions if I can at least get that all figured out..

I don't really remember, I did this long ago. I know it involved a bit of googling, though.

If your scanner is connected via USB, then you have to run "lsusb". This lists all your USB devices. Search for an entry which looks like your scanner. This, for example, is my scanner:

Bus 005 Device 005: ID 04f9:0184 Brother Industries, Ltd DCP-7025 Printer

The 4-digit numbers after "ID" are the ones you have to use in your udev rules. In this case:

SYSFS{idVendor}=="04f9", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0184", MODE="664", GROUP="scanner"

This instruction is quite similar to those from Brother: http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/
There you also get the driver packages.

Whenever requesting new package additions to Ubuntu,, please follow these guidelines:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages

I' ll try to modify the bug report to make it compliant to those guidelines.

This package should still make it at least into multiverse, although IANAL (I am not a lawyer).

Scanner still does not JW with Ubuntu 10.04 beta; printer component does though.

Nevermind, they just broke the printer too.

Can I put a bounty on this or is it going to be faster for me to just go out and buy an HP?

I used the drivers for the printer from the repo, I did use the bscan2 file from Brother for the scanner, however they did update their pages for 9.10/10.04. all brother scanners use the same device ID here are their instructions:

Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04
    1. Open "/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libsane.rules" file.
    2.Add the following two lines to the end of the device list. (Before the line "# The following rule will disable ..."):

    The lines to be added---------------------------

    # Brother scanners
    ATTRS{idVendor}=="04f9", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

    3. Restart the OS.

Here is the link: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/instruction_scn1c.html#u9.10

sorry, I meant Vendor string not device ID.. Alswo worked like a charm, the only thing is I can't get the scan-key thing to work but that rely doesn't matter, I'm just glad I can scan..

I've uploaded the package to revu.

From where can this package be tested?
(i.e. what is revu)

I can only find a package libsane-extras 1.0.20.1ubuntu1 on maverick alpha 3 which seems to be the same as on Lucid.

http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/ is for packages that should be reviewed by Ubuntu Developers.

Search for brscan, brscan2 and brscan3 on http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/. From there you can download the debs.

Have done a update with Synaptic. It say's that it is using brscan3 0.2.11-2 on the Ubuntu 9.04
I needs a sudo xsane to get it working on print and scan, despite ATTRS{idVendor}=="04f9", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes".
Is brscan3_0.2.11-0ubuntu1.debian.tar.gz in the http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/p/brscan3 an updated version ?

@rowez: the line also has MODE="..." and GROUP="...", right?

(I'm not an Ubuntu user, but I suppose udev doesn't differ that much between distros... (we hope))

@rowez: I didn't take account of this permission issue on building the package. I think that should be corrected either in the udev or in the libsane package.

@Nuno and James

Followed the instruction, without MODE="664" en GROUP="scanner", from James. Have added them to /etc/udev/40-libsane.rules, restart udev and it works now.

The other row: SYSFS{idVendor}=="04f9", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0184", MODE="644", GROUP="scanner" have been removed.

mc -e /etc/udev/40-libsane.rules
ATTRS{idVendor}=="04f9", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes", MODE="664" en GROUP="scanner"
sudo service udev restart
start xsane as NOT root.

I used the fix as per 9.04/10.04 from the Brother FAQ's: not successfully at first. Then I re-read line 2 of their instruction, and put the extra line in the right place, (it's also clearly indicated where to put it in the start of the file, if only I read the instructions ocasionally -
"# To add a USB device, add a rule to the list below between the
 # LABEL="libsane_usb_rules_begin" and LABEL="libsane_usb_rules_end" lines."

Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04
    1. Open "/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libsane.rules" file.
    2.Add the following two lines to the end of the device list. (Before the line "# The following rule will disable ..."):

    The lines to be added---------------------------

    # Brother scanners
    ATTRS{idVendor}=="04f9", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

And then restarted the system, and yay, the scanner works in Natty.

FYI Brother now has a package to address this brother-udev-rule-type1-1.0.0-1.all.deb

Link is http://www.brother.com/cgi-bin/agreement/agreement.cgi?dlfile=http://www.brother.com/pub/bsc/linux/dlf/brother-udev-rule-type1-1.0.0-1.all.deb&lang=English_lpr