I get what you're saying, but there's _always_ a cost. Big businesses have a vested interest in forcibly obsoleting old equipment - after all, HP doesn't make a dime on resold equipment of that kind. Continuing to support it via drivers and web resources doesn't make them any money, and in my opinion only serves to generate support calls.

I see the larger point you're making, but in the case of winprinters I don't think they're as big of a problem as you're making out. Almost ever other printer will work fine without drivers, the only ones that will have problems are some winprinters, and those things eat up the performance of older machines and to be honest should just go away.

I think given that regular old printers are plentiful, in the end the world won't be a bad place if winprinters become unusable.

Jeffrey.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:

What HP is doing isn't refusing to maintain their printers, it is actively choosing not to provide, even on an "as-is, don't expect support" fashion, *existing* drivers. Drivers which require no work to create, because they were already here. Drivers which require no work to distribute, because they were already available on the HP website. They've just (metaphorically speaking) tracked down and *destroyed* every CD and floppy collection of Slackware 7.1 (current as of 1998).

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"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine