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 ~♥
“We first had to venture miles deep into the woods to find a local Circuit City, which bountifully bore free trial AOL CDs like fruit. We then grabbed an armful, despite the protests of the clerk, and hastily returned to camp. We then had to build a fire by hand, with kindling and wood, and we donned our robes. As the fire grew, we meditated and chanted around the fire, as we mentally mounted the Serious Sam bootleg install files. It took weeks to and a several acres of wood to chant the correct order of ones and zeroes, so we had to work in teams and take shifts. When it was my turn, I took a CD and stuck it through a metal stick stuck into the fire. I spun the CD with my bare hands, blistered and swollen by fiery praying, and lowered it into the fire to burn the ones, and raised it slightly for the zeroes. Any error found by the final validation step would result in premature cremation by the group. There were not many of us left by the time we had the LAN party. A room full of Pentium 4 PCs made the room feel as hot as a furnace, but the pizzas were cold that day, little ones. So cold…”