Comment by lmm
2 months ago
Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
2 months ago
Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
Even if nobody is building a printer from scratch, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of open source firmware project (like there is for, say, digital cameras) just in order to avoid all the driver nightmares people complain about.
Digital cameras have a stable(ish) lens interface, so people use a smaller number of models for longer. Consumer inkjet printers are so cheap and change so often that there is no single model that's popular enough for people to coalesce around (and people who do care about e.g. a printer that works well on Linux will research and buy one that's known to work well on Linux - printers are pretty much a commodity, whereas people have strong feelings about their camera hardware and want to use a particular camera with different firmware instead of changing cameras)