[cups] Newbie seeks help / FreeBSD 12.0 / Brother MFC-7860DW

[Brian Potkin]

On Mon 10 Jun 2019 at 14:55:23 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

[...]

> If there are a boatloads of free/GPLd .ppd files available out there for
> Brother printers, and/or for other brands and models. then why haven't
> the CUPS maintainers included those in the recent CUPS distribution(s)?

The freeness of the CUPSwrapper printer driver is not the problem; the
non-freeness of the LPR printer driver is. Part of the latter's licence
has:

 > Further, Brother shall have no liability to disclose and/or
 > distribute the source code of the Software to User under
 > any circumstances. In no case shall the above license by
 > Brother to modify, alter, translate or otherwise prepare
 > derivative works of the Software be construed as Brother's
 > implied agreement or undertakings to disclose and/or distribute
 > the source code of the Software.

Debian Bug #635157 provides further background in Messages #25 and #45.

 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=635157

An excerpt from LP #701856:

 > Unfortunately, at Ubuntu we cannot fix this problem with a
 > reasonable effort. There was already a volunteer some time ago
 > who repackages Brother's driver package in an easy-to-install
 > way, but he has given up after some time and Brother continues
 > to issue support for new printers in the same awkward ways as
 > before. The only one who can really solve the problem is Brother.

-- 
Brian.