Open-source linux scanner

Question

I want to buy a scanner for my future Linux machine. But I am worried about spyware since scanners bundle third-party proprietary software with the scanner and printer manufacturers already use steganography.

Does any company sell open-source scanners with the same business model as the MakerBot Replicator, whose plans were open-source and the company had profits from customers who didn't want to make the 3D printer from scratch?

on the OCR side of things, which is a significant component of scanner software bundles, you can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software) quite effectively. — Italian Philosophers 4 Monica, Aug 12 '18 at 23:34
Yes, I will use an open source OCR such as Tesseract, OCRopus, or ScanTailor. — miguelmorin, Aug 20 '18 at 08:06

F. Alessandro · Accepted Answer · 2022-05-17T19:19:51.337

The Free Software Foundation has made a list of GNU/Linux compatible hardwares, freely editable by anyone with an account, which can be found here:

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw

Then after going to that website go to H-node's search (H-node is the directory of FOSS hardware):

https://h-node.org/

And go to scanners category:

https://h-node.org/scanners/catalogue/en

As of August 2018, the list of scanners with full compatibility with free software has 6 models with commercialization dates between 2002 and 2011.

Edit 2022:

Definitely also checkout the RYF (Respects Your Freedom) certification by the FSF https://ryf.fsf.org/products . While there aren't any scanners yet, it's a really good cert for libre hardware and new entries will be added in the future.

fwiw it's worth, though this is from a long time ago, I've had extremely poor results from a member of the Canoscan family under both Linux and macos. — Italian Philosophers 4 Monica, Aug 12 '18 at 23:38

Open-source linux scanner

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