+1 for a cool title, and great choice of a camera. I once used a friend's Hasselblad in the Scottish highlands, and the photo looked almost nicer than reality.
A refusal to share the source code of a driver in the 1970s (on the side of Xerox Corp.) angered RMS enough back then to start the Free Software Foundation, and the rest is history, after all. So let's see what your solution will be...
What you could do is buy the scanner and after your project offer others to scan their slides to get some of the money back. Or team up with others and split the cost of the scanner upfront (this latter scheme requires someone to hold the physical device, I think donating it to a library after the project would be a fair mechanism, so each party - and others - can still use it later).
I wonder if the company would be willing to grant a patent license to an open hardware version of the scanner. They’re not manufacturing them anymore, nobody else seems interested in making the damn things… let it go.
A refusal to share the source code of a driver in the 1970s (on the side of Xerox Corp.) angered RMS enough back then to start the Free Software Foundation, and the rest is history, after all. So let's see what your solution will be...
What you could do is buy the scanner and after your project offer others to scan their slides to get some of the money back. Or team up with others and split the cost of the scanner upfront (this latter scheme requires someone to hold the physical device, I think donating it to a library after the project would be a fair mechanism, so each party - and others - can still use it later).