I bought a new HP+ LaserJet MFP M234dwe printer and it has my blood boiling. You set it up with an app (red flag). It uses an anti-pattern to try to get you to agree to send all of your data to them and friends (red flag). It forces a connection to the Internet (red flag).
@vitali64sur I expected it to just work like old HP printers did. Now it just works the way they want it to. I put that project aside, but I think the next step is to give this away and buy an old HP printer that only connects to a computer with USB.
@thomzane I inspected an older version and soon found proprietary software, but I now inspected hplip-3.23.5 and found proprietary software as well.
Sure COPYING says: HPLIP is free, open source software, distributed under the following open source licenses:
GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 MIT license BSD license GNU General Public License (GPL) v3
Then I read down and well: "A small subset of HP devices require proprietary software technologies to allow full access to printer features and performance. These technologies cannot be open sourced. Because of this, HP is releasing binary plug-ins for each of these printers that work in conjunction with our Linux Open Source Printing Software to improve the printing experience for HP�s Linux Printing Customers. These binary plug-ins require the user to read and agree to a license agreement at the time of driver installation.", which makes it pretty clear that there's proprietary trickery at play.
Under ppd/hpcups there are lots of proprietary ppd files, but I guess that's not software.
hplip contains at least 2 proprietary binaries under; hplip-3.23.5/prnt/hpcups/libImageProcessor-x86_32.so hplip-3.23.5/prnt/hpcups/libImageProcessor-x86_64.so
Pretty much either; a. HP holds all the copyright and says the it's under the GPLv2-or-later, but is lying and using the GPLv2 and v3's good name so people don't realise it's proprietary. b. HP has made derivative works of existing GPLv2 and GPLv3 works and has committed copyright infringement by infringing the license on such works by making proprietary derivative works, but has avoided committing clear cut infringement by ensuring to release the existing source files under the same license.
Any recent printer supports IPP{S}, so I recommend using that instead.
@thomzane Sure, but there's a lot of other parts of questionable licensing and I'm fairly confident that there is other proprietary stuff, as after all, HP intentionally put proprietary software in a release that was mean to be "open source".
Hopefully, Debian patches all the proprietary parts out, but unless someone has checked every last file, you really can't be sure.
@thomzane Well I wouldn't, as the Debian developers have taken a dump on the DFSG by rewriting it to allow for the Debian installer to install proprietary software without even asking.
They call it "firmware", but that's a misnomer, as it's proprietary peripheral software and manufacturers only call it "firmware", as they intend that you're not able to replace such proprietary software.
Their track record has been better than most distros, but I wouldn't call it "good".
@Suiseiseki I generally trust Debian maintainers to diligently follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines and patch out any questionable material. Their track record has historically been very good.