[Openicc] X-Rite to aquire GreytagMacbeth

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 01 February 2006 12:27 pm, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, Hal V. Engel wrote:
> > I am in talks right now with X-Rite.  At this point I have no indications
> > of how receptive they are but they have not told me to go away and the
> > form that I filled out for them did list Unix as a platform and I checked
> > other and then wrote in POSIX as my platform.   So I don't know if it
> > will go anywhere but this is in the very early stages.
>
> It is quite likely that for X-Rite "Unix as a platform" means Solaris
> with KCMS.  Other than a chinese page I did not find mention of
> Solaris on the X-Rite web site.  The Solaris documentation does
> mention driver support, and Kodak sells printers, copiers, and other
> equipment (Photo CD mastering?) with Solaris built in and using the
> X-Rite devices.  Unfortunately, it looks like the heavy lifting has
> primarily been done by Sun/Xerox and unless KCMS sources are released
> as part of Open Solaris, this is not an avenue to success.
>
> I am definitely willing to pay substantially more money for a smarter
> "portable" device which allows its manufacturer to support closed and
> open source systems without giving away their trade secrets.  As
> primarily a Unix user, I am not particularly interested in spending a
> lot of money on a product which only works for Windows, Mac OSX, or
> even Solaris (my current desktop).  Perhaps if we band together in a
> visible enough way, the vendors will see that there is a market.
>
> Bob

Bob,

You may be correct that X-Rite views Unix as meaning Solaris.  But this seems 
like a very limited view of this market segment.  If they have drivers for 
Solaris then it should be possible for them to generalize these to work with 
a broader set of POSIX platforms without too much difficulty.  In addition 
Solaris 10 supports SPARC, x86 and x86_64 hardware so this means that any 
X-Rite drivers available for Solaris should already support those hardware 
architectures. I also did a search of available products for Solaris on the 
Sun web site and it does list vendor name X-Rite product name DTP70 as 
available for the x86 but not for SPARC.

In addition I get the impression that the drivers for this class of devices 
are not particularly complicated (the driver code for the avaspec driver is 
only a few 100 lines of code) and that the only reason that most of these 
vendors have the driver is to hide the actual device interface to, as you put 
it, not give away trade secrets.  On the other hand if you are effectively a 
monopoly does this matter anymore?

I think we already have an example in the video driver area that could show 
the way for this market segment.  Video drivers if anything are much more 
complex and do in fact have a huge impact on how the device operates.  Much 
more so in both respects, I believe, than do the drivers for the class of 
devices that we are talking about.    I would prefer that the drivers for 
both device classes be open source but at least with respect to nvidia we 
know that as long as the device vendor releases properly supported closed 
binary drivers that OSS users will embrace the vendor's products.  Why can't 
the same be true for the devices of interest to us?

When I found out that GMB had Linux drivers for the i1 the real issue in my 
mind was will my users be able to get these for their architecture/platform?  
I am for the most part resigned to having to use proprietary binary drivers 
but this is only a viable option if the vendor does their part like nvidia 
has with their drivers.  So far none seem to be ready to do their part.   
That is the real issue we need to deal with.

Bob's idea of banding together in a visible way sounds good but how can we be 
more visable?  We have members of the ICC who are on this list and I would 
suspect that at least some of the vendors in this area have some awareness of 
it's existence.  What else can we do?   I think that this is what we should 
be talking about.

One other thing to consider.   In the past I have worked as a DBA supporting 
Oracle databases.  When we did Oracle installations/upgrades we received a 
tape (later a CD) that had the Oracle source code on it and we built the 
binaries as part of the installation/upgrade.  All Oracle has to protect as a 
trade secret is the source code and that source code is available to any 
Unix/Linux/BSD Oracle customer as every one of them has a tape or CD with 
that source code.  And I can assure you that that code was orders of 
magnitude more complex than the drivers we are talking about.  Of course the 
Oracle source code is closed making it illegal to copy or distribute the code 
because of the license agreement that each customer has with Oracle.  But 
this approach greatly reduces the cost of supporting Unix/Linux/BSD since 
Oracle leaves it up to the customer to correctly build the software for their 
platform.   

This approach is half way between the closed binary approach of nvidia and 
open source drivers like the G series Matrox drivers.  If this approach is 
good enough for Oracle why isn't it good enough for other vendors? I suspect 
that part of the reason is that the vast majority of Oracle installations are 
on Unix/Linux/BSD platforms where as nvidia and X-Rite view these platforms 
as a side show rather than where their bread is buttered.

Hal