win95/98/ME and printers. An ethics issue comparable to DRM servers or not?

[Jeffrey Watts]

I get what you're saying, but there's _always_ a cost.  Big businesses have
a vested interest in forcibly obsoleting old equipment - after all, HP
doesn't make a dime on resold equipment of that kind.  Continuing to support
it via drivers and web resources doesn't make them any money, and in my
opinion only serves to generate support calls.

I see the larger point you're making, but in the case of winprinters I don't
think they're as big of a problem as you're making out.  Almost ever other
printer will work fine without drivers, the only ones that will have
problems are some winprinters, and those things eat up the performance of
older machines and to be honest should just go away.

I think given that regular old printers are plentiful, in the end the world
won't be a bad place if winprinters become unusable.

Jeffrey.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:

> What HP is doing isn't refusing to maintain their printers, it is actively
> choosing not to provide, even on an "as-is, don't expect support" fashion,
> *existing* drivers.  Drivers which require no work to create, because they
> were already here.  Drivers which require no work to distribute, because
> they were already available on the HP website.  They've just (metaphorically
> speaking) tracked down and *destroyed* every CD and floppy collection of
> Slackware 7.1 (current as of 1998).
>
>

-- 

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that
will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kclug.org/pipermail/kclug/attachments/20080804/1042454c/attachment.htm>