[Openicc] Epson HTM CUPS drivers

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 7, 2011, at 6:41 PM, Robert Krawitz wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Feb 2011 18:30:22 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> Has anyone looked into wrapping Epson's existing HTM (half-tone
>> module) for their pro printers for Linux/CUPS? Maybe this is a
>> licensing issue for Linux that just can't be bridged. But without
>> asking, maybe no one knows the answer to this.
> 
> That's surely closed source, with all the attendant problems (binary
> dependencies, 32 vs. 64 bit, non-x86 architectures, you name it).

I will bet it's 32bit and 64bit x86, and 32bit PPC only. And it is no doubt closed source. It's a black box. RGB or CMYK go in one end, and ESC/P comes out the other. So it would be a different project than Gutenprint maybe. It could still be freeware, even if that HTM black box is not open sourced. The time to market would be faster. And the profiles already available would then work on Linux.

I just received an email from a friend and it appears the cost of the HTMs is free even for commercial products, but yes very closed and lots of agreements to sign. So that is not compatible, probably, with an open source solution if the idea is that it must be 100% open, rather than 90% open except for this little black box that gets us ESC/P. Maybe it would have to be a separate shareware project to make it worth someone's effort.


Chris Murphy