The FOSS community should work on a firmware-replacement solution like OpenWRT on routers, but for printers! Call it something like OpenPrint? It would be based on Linux!

It would unlock a printer’s potential and cancel out the cartridge DRM, continue printing regardless of unused ink color levels for the job, be totally freed from proprietary corporate bloatware that comes bundled with the printer, offer integration with personal cloud services (wanna scan that document? Boom, now it’s on your NextCloud RAID NAS, your iPhone, and your grandmother’s desktop), and other quality of life printer features that would significantly improve a country’s happiness and life expectancy.

It’s going to be a crapshoot at first. Printer drivers are a nightmare to write for each and every model. Hardware requirements to make this work are probably going to be limited to the most expensive and fastest octa-core printers. But a jailbreak community will emerge, and people will try to push the movement onto more and more printers, and develop workarounds for older models. Then, someone will develop a printer that ships only with OpenPrint, which will probably be kinda expensive at first, but all the parts will be user-replaceable, and the ink/toner will still be cheap to refill, which is the main goal. Big Printer would have to compete to make their printers more user-friendly, or die from the weight of their own greed.

I wanna believe ~♥