1

I have a new printer (a Brother MFC-9970CDW, so a pretty new one at the hour of me writing) and I tried to connect to it through the "Printing" utility. But at the step where I am supposed to select the driver, my own printer is not listed in there. This is not a problem for me, since I can manually download the driver from the manufacturer site. Moreover it is a GPLv2 software.

Nonetheless, is there a way for me to help the community by uploading any proprietary driver to Ubuntu? I have read this Ask Ubuntu question "How to get my software into Ubuntu?" but it doesn't answer my concern, since the driver I am talking about is actually not a product of my own work.

1
  • Important update to my question, for future search engine users: since Ubuntu 12.04, you just can use the 'Printing' utility of Ubuntu. Then select Network Printer, choose your MFC-9970CDZ, etc. No manual installation of drivers is necessary anymore.
    – Agmenor
    Sep 12, 2012 at 2:27

1 Answer 1

2

In this case, that question does apply.

The Brother printer drivers are, as far as I can see, under GPLv2 which means they're redistributable without permission from Brother under the terms of that license.

The hard part is collating them into something that is useful. You could generate a billion packages (one for each printer) or group them together to form single packages. This is largely a different topic (there are questions on packaging) but you'll want to talk to the people who maintain the drivers for printers in Ubuntu to see how things are currently done.

But license wise, you should be fine.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .