I must apologise that I haven’t so far open-sourced any part of this that I don’t have to. Mainly that’s because I think this would be an awesomely sticky web property for a printer consumables firm to integrate with their sales site. And I’d much prefer it if they paid me to white-label it for them, rather than just forking a repo and getting it all for free.
They might be interested if they cared at all about the ease of use of their printers
The hardest part would probably be convincing someone to pay to white label something for which most of the key design choices and implementation came from one unfamiliar dev prompting an £18 Claude Code subscription.
Claude was great, but I did put a fair amount of my own time and (non-printing-specific) expertise into this. OTOH, sure, I wouldn’t be asking for a million dollars.
Xerox just removed all the Linux drivers first for the majority of older models (even actual ones, which you can still buy), Windows and macOS drivers second for selected models (yet).
Canon, Pantum, Brother, Kyocera, HP, they all still produce new devices on older hardware base, which require driver and does not support AirPrint/Mopria even over USB. They just don't care, they reuse what they wrote 20 years ago and ship it. Xerox and HP use Samsung printing engine and drivers, Pantum uses Lexmark.
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They might be interested if they cared at all about the ease of use of their printers
The hardest part would probably be convincing someone to pay to white label something for which most of the key design choices and implementation came from one unfamiliar dev prompting an £18 Claude Code subscription.
Claude was great, but I did put a fair amount of my own time and (non-printing-specific) expertise into this. OTOH, sure, I wouldn’t be asking for a million dollars.
These printer makers have the source code and the ability to write firmware. If they wanted to support WebUSB, they could and would.
Xerox just removed all the Linux drivers first for the majority of older models (even actual ones, which you can still buy), Windows and macOS drivers second for selected models (yet).
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/xerox-removed-linux-d...
https://forum.support.xerox.com/community?id=community_quest...
Canon, Pantum, Brother, Kyocera, HP, they all still produce new devices on older hardware base, which require driver and does not support AirPrint/Mopria even over USB. They just don't care, they reuse what they wrote 20 years ago and ship it. Xerox and HP use Samsung printing engine and drivers, Pantum uses Lexmark.
They are referring to aftermarket ink cartridge companies, not the printer OEM.