this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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A printer or printer firmware. There was a discussion about this elsewhere on lemmy, of course this would be difficult and expensive but it would be very cool
The biggest issue I see is that most of the tech is someone's IP. If it's not patented, it's copyrighted or trademarked. Otherwise, it should be a doable PoC with old parts and a barebones firmware. I don't need my FOSS printer to contend with Xerox, I just need it to poop out a page when I hit print.
I'd also love to see a FOSS page description language that could dethrone Adobe's PostScript and HP's PCL as the standards.
Some of the OLD HP Thinkjet printers were pretty rudimentary; the original Thinkjet cartridges are still widely manufactured for certain industrial applications. Tell me we couldn't reprap that shit.
A reprap style project could probably make a passable document printer- but what's the appeal? People only work on those projects to make new or previously unobtainable machines available.
I just don't think it'd be worth the effort.
I think the appeal is to have some kind of paper printer that isn't under the thumb of fucking megacorps.