> It was missing what would quickly be considered a standard feature
That is an anachronistic claim which sounds logical to the reader in 2020 but doesn’t match the environment of decades ago. The feature he added could have been based on, from perspective of the producer of the printer, completely non existing API.
That is, something available to different customers, but completely specific to the setup of every customer.
Additionally, it was the principle that mattered to RMS. One can often do some reverse engineering intervention to achieve the desired modification even based on the closed source, but it’s still against the conceptual advantages of working on the codebase which is by policy free. As in:
“Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.”
The principle works even once the network messaging API in some environment is standardized and starts to allow some, from that point on, “standard feature”.
I think you misunderstood my use of the word "standard". I did not mean "standard" in the sense of complying to some particular RFC or anything like that. I meant that some kind of feedback/monitoring capability is de rigueur for that product segment, and that feature needs to be listed on the spec sheet for the product to be considered adequate. Even a completely proprietary network printing protocol needs to have a status reporting capability to be taken seriously.
That is an anachronistic claim which sounds logical to the reader in 2020 but doesn’t match the environment of decades ago. The feature he added could have been based on, from perspective of the producer of the printer, completely non existing API.
That is, something available to different customers, but completely specific to the setup of every customer.
Additionally, it was the principle that mattered to RMS. One can often do some reverse engineering intervention to achieve the desired modification even based on the closed source, but it’s still against the conceptual advantages of working on the codebase which is by policy free. As in:
“Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
The principle works even once the network messaging API in some environment is standardized and starts to allow some, from that point on, “standard feature”.