Apple Licenses CUPS

bmeteor writes: "Short and very sweet: CUPS is licensed by Apple. A boon for both Apple and GNU." CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) is a system based on the Internet Printing Protocol for standardized printing on Unix systems. That's nice, but when can I print over the network to my Epson inkjet, like I can in Mac OS 9 with USB Printer Sharing?

Comments

Re:Not so good for GNU

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

The Aqua-fied version probably wouldn't be much use to non-OS X users, so I don't see how that's much of a loss to GNU. Apple will probably want to keep the underlying stuff in sync between Darwin and OS X, though, just for their own convenience. If they make any changes to the unix-level parts that get distributed with Darwin they'll have to make the source available. I guess we'll see how it turns out, but for the moment I don't see how more widespread adoption of an improved open printing protocol could be thought to be bad.

Plenty good for GNU

[cduffy]

Funding Free Software development by selling non-Free licenses is a perfectly reasonable and good action; the revenues from this, remember, will in large part go to pay the folks who write the Free version.

RE: It's my trumpet and I'll blow it if I want to

[John Fulmer]

Or just use lpd. I've been using lpd/lpr, samba, and netatalk for at least 5 years to print to various printers, including HP and Epson inkjets from Linux, BSD, Irix, Solaris, Windows (98,NT,2K), and the occasional rare MacOS.

Re:Not so good for GNU

[Phroggy]

Apple is only licensing CUPS from the copyright holder (Easy Software Products) to get around the GNU restrictions, so a proprietary version can be distributed without source.

It's a good thing because of the standards Apple will be using, not because of the license they distribute their software under. Apple has adopted XML as the file format for all kinds of things; does it matter if they read and write those XML files with proprietary closed-source software? The point is that Free software can also be used because XML is standard. I don't know much about CUPS, but it seems to me that I'll eventually be able to use CUPS on Linux to print across the network to my Epson printer connected to my iMac, and that's a good thing.

Also, would Apple's use of CUPS make it easier to get printer drivers from Mac OS X ported to Linux? Would they even need to be ported, or can CUPS drivers be used cross-platform? This could mean much better printer support in Linux, since hardware vendors who refuse to acknowledge Linux will obviously be supporting Mac OS X...