Maki

I’m not a lawyer, but I would expect so.

Don’t overengineer the prototype. Make it simple and efficient as a jumping off platform to lead to further developments down the road. Any open printer project doesn’t have to start with the technology the proprietary models have. They just have to be proof-of-concept that it’s doable. Once that’s proven, further developments can be made down the line. Dot matrix is easy to create and cheap to produce compared to the overengineered systems proprietary models use nowadays and it would work as a stepping stone toward that further development.

The print head is not complex, the printer companies just make it out to be. Essentially it’s just a funnel to transfer ink onto paper. All that’s needed is a needle to deliver the ink to the paper, or puncture the top layer to inject the ink to it. Apply heat to set the ink afterward. Moving the head over the paper and moving the rollers for the paper to move is already software which is known to the 3d printing community. The big trick is finding a system which doesn’t hit some backward patent and getting a prototype made. That largely takes time and money.

A new distro is built upon the concept of stackages, but dies silently not half a year later. Hardliners still use it for years after but nobody wants to maintain it.

MNG is a bit of an oddity; it was originally supposed to replace GIF but was itself replaced with PNG, Flash, and SVG. I have no such files available but ImageMagick can supposedly make one out of a number of PNG or JPG files if you’re interested in toying with it.

My point exactly.

Now try to find somewhere which accepts apng or mng. I’ll wait. ;)