The gdevhl12.c driver for Brother HL-12xx b/w laser printers was made part of the GPL'ed version of the 7.x series. The gdevhl12.c file says that gdevhl12.c is placed in the public domain by its author, Marek Michalkiewicz <marekm@amelek.gda.pl>. However, ghostscript-8.01/doc/History6.htm mentions that gdevhl12.c was added to the (AFPL) mainstream release on 27 April 2000 (lines 5115-5118) with a dual AFPL/GPL licence and removed on 02 July 2000 due to an incompatible licence (lines 4334-4336). Since gdevhl12.c now appears public domain, could it again become part of the mainstream release, or at least the GPL'ed release?
Created attachment 684 [details] patch to use mtime instead of ctime for reporting baseline dates attaching a patch that uses the proper stat() field to generate the comparison test's ShortDescription.
Comment on attachment 684 [details] patch to use mtime instead of ctime for reporting baseline dates sorry, patch belongs on the previous bug! please disregard.
If it is in fact public domain, then we'll take it in all versions. Updating the priority to reflect reality.
*** Bug 687908 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 688456 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 688707 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The main advantage of the gdevhl12.c driver over pxlmono is printing at 1200x600 dpi. I fully understand concerns about this driver being unmaintained. However, when I filed this as a bug two years ago, I was under the impression that the only reason for removing gdevhl12.c was a misunderstanding regarding its licence.
yeah... that caused me lots of headaches over one year. i just didn't KNOW the driver wasn't part of ghostcript any longer. i nearly threw my printer out of the window :).
With the merger of GPL Ghostscript with ESP Ghostscript the hl1250 driver got re-introduced. The driver is in the contrib/ directory which will not be included in commercially licensed Ghostscript implementations but will be included in Linux distributions. So the problem is solved.
neat. i can't wait for the driver to hit my distro (archlinux), my printer drives me in-sane. btw. it's really hard, nearlly impossible, to tell, what's wrong if the driver in ghostscript is missing. i still wonder, how i found out about that missing driver for my model.