Linux Printing: A Curious Mix of Yuck and Excellence, part 1

“Part of the problem with Linux printing is the usual printer
vendor hostility to non-Windows users. Even when there are good
vendor-supported Linux drivers, they are often not
feature-equivalent to their Windows cousins, and they act as though
CUPS doesn’t exist at all. But there are some exceptions to this,
most notably Hewlett-Packard printers. So, in search of hope, I had
a good conversation with Hewlett Packard’s General Manager of Core
Technology, Sam Greenblatt.

“The HPLIP project is a mostly FOSS project that supports the
majority of HP’s printers. HPLIP drivers and software are licensed
under BSD, MIT, and GPL licenses. Plus there are a few proprietary
binary-only bits for some printers; I don’t know which ones, but
it’s apparently a small number.”

Complete
Story