All,
During our New York PWG meeting two weeks ago, we held an evening session on
the idea of an Open Source IPP Client.
See the minutes below for the outcome. This message is a reminder for you to
make suggestions about Priorities and Scenarios for IPP Clients.
BTW, I have got an explanation about why the guy from Corel did not phone
in. He was just leaving the company and didn't see IPP as his responsibility
any more. The company seems to be in a bit of turmoil for the moment, but we
might be able to get them interested later or else take up contact with some
of the other Linux vendors. Does any of you have contact with any other
Linux vendor that would be interested?
Please send further correspondence on this subject to the pwg-ipp at pwg.org
DL. Subscribe to that DL if you are interested in this subject.
Carl-Uno
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3. Open Source IPP Client
The PWG-IPP group held a special evening session to discuss the idea of an
"Open Source" IPP Client. [Michael Sweet, Ira McDonald, Dave Kellerman, and
Jay Martin joined the group via telephone to participate in the discussion.]
Carl-Uno presented slides on the material distributed in his May 3 e- mail.
It was suggested that the group should enlist the participation of other
platform vendors. Mobile phones and Palm Pilot were both mentioned as
possibilities. Although many people agreed with this idea, it was considered
a lower priority.
The group decided to first focus on developing a successful solution on
Windows and Linux before addressing other platforms.
Henrik Holst reported that his company is developing Bluetooth. i- data has
announced that they plan to provide printing over Bluetooth. It was
suggested that a critical analysis of Microsoft's client should be provided.
What exactly is missing? Which "important features" are believed to be
necessary/desirable? Will most customers/users agree?
If the source code is generally available, does the PWG wish to allow anyone
to modify it and incorporate it into his/her company product(s)? What
licensing restrictions (if any) should be established? Other early steps
that also need to be established and/or questions that need to be resolved
were identified: - Who will be responsible for doing what? - What is the
list of feature requirements for the client? - What will be the process for
the development effort(s)? - How can the PWG help to enable the development
of IPP "killer applications"?
Carl-Uno made it clear that he is not the right person for leading this
activity. It was suggested that if the group cannot find a leader for this
effort, it should not go any further. Would it need to be a joint
development effort-or could a single company just donate their own software
solution? One suggestion was that each of the PWG member companies could
contribute money to collectively pay for a third party group to do the
effort. Another suggestion was for all the individual companies to
contribute their existing code into a common "pool" and make it available
for anyone who is interested in doing anything they want with it. [Then the
group would "wait and see" what happens...]
The group agreed that the highest priority "next step" is to identify the
specific goals, objectives, and feature requirements for the project.
ACTION: Each member should propose a set of "important client
features"-explained by suggested scenarios-and submit them for discussion on
the PWG-IPP e-mail list. Craig Whittle volunteered to lead the effort of
reaching consensus on the relative priorities of the client feature set.
Carl-Uno Manros
Principal Engineer - Xerox Architecture Center - Xerox Corporation
701 S. Aviation Blvd., El Segundo, CA, M/S: ESAE-231
Phone +1-310-333 8273, Fax +1-310-333 5514
Email: manros at cp10.es.xerox.com