My employer is Danka Deutschland GmbH, a leading and manufacturer-independent provider of professional and hi-speed digital printing systems, black-and-white as well as color. Danka provides hardware, software, service, maintenance, consumables and customized solutions for the products in its portfolio. I work there as a System Engineer. Amongst the brands Danka offers are Heidelberg (formerly Kodak), Canon, Hewlett-Packard®, Hitachi, Infotec and EfI.
My acquaintance with Linux® and the Free Software community is not too old. When I started to play around with Linux® at the beginning of 1999, my deepest disappointment was the poor support for printing. True, I made all our machines spit out simplex prints -- mdash; but what about duplex? What about punching the output? How to make sorting work? Or stapling, cover sheets and all the other beautiful finishing options our engines offer to customers? No way -- mdash; at least for me as a non-geek!
I began a search on the Internet for a solution. Fortunately not much later, in May 1999, Mike Sweet, principal developer of CUPS, announced the first Beta release of this superb piece of printing software. After trying it briefly, I knew this was it!
Next thing I attempted: to make Linux® distributions interested in this new stuff. Believe me -- mdash; it was more than tenacious! They seemed to think they already had the best thing they could get in printing. One reason probably was that they (and many Linux® developers) never had to think about how to best support a printer duplexer -- mdash; because one had never come near their own desks...
Finally, my attempts to make some Linux® print publications interested in CUPS “backfired” on me - one editor squeezed me into writing a series on the subject myself. And this is how some people started to give me the nickname “CUPS Evangelist”. I will not get rid of this nick anytime soon, now that even the TDE people wedged me into their timeframe of releases. Oh, boy...
Anyway, CUPS is now making its way around the world and it might well become a triumphal one: I am a little bit proud to have supported and contributed to this from near the beginning.
It should encourage you: even if some more experienced Linux® users than you are skeptical about it, and even if your programming skills are next to zero (like mine) - there are a lot of tasks and jobs and ideas, and talent that you can contribute to the Free Software community. Not least within the TDE project... ;-)
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