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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?
I used it around '98 or '99, and it got the job done for me.
I hope Apple has success -- the PrintManager and the printing architecture in general is a significant weakness of OS X. Printing for me typically entails making a PS or a PDF and moving it to my NeXT for printing or FAXing. It's too much of a bother to deal with the OS X printing tools.
And I can't share my USB printer, which is just stupid. Neither by NetInfo or by SMB, or by LPR.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Setup is easy and the quality is on par with Windows' output.
Any attempt by any company to introduce new technologies that are based on standards and that provide a means to work well with any and every platform should be considered a plus for the industry. We must get past the platform specific train of thought and focus on systems that make the platform you choose simply a personal choice and not one that will limit your ability to be productive.
IPP is the way of the future. It provides a mechanism to connect any and every printer in the world together with any delivery mechanism. The possibilities of providing a common printing mechanism are astounding. Imagine doing away with low quality fax machines and being able to send a secure and private document around the world directly to someone's desk. Imagine sending a birthday card to Grandma right to her living room. Imagine printing from a wireless device while walking down the street to a printer at a print shop ready to pick up!
Forget snail mail and faxing IPP is the only way to go!
just do the steps listed in the hint at Mac OS X Hints.
Non impediti ratione cogitationis.
I just recently became aware of OMNI, a unix printing system by IBM based off Ghostscript. It seems very comprehensive, they list support for *610* printers.
What struck about this is that I thought CUPS was pretty well-agreed upon by the major players as a common unix (the CU in CUPS) standard. How does OMNI compare with CUPS? Or do they perhaps represent different levels of the whole printing system and do they compliment one another?
And why can he post stuff to the frontpage?
Pudge is Chris Nandor. Long-standing MacPerl person, and now working for OSDN by the looks of things. The story was posted to the Apple section first, and presumably made it to the front page from there.
-dair
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.
"The standard CUPS distribution will be provided with Apple's open source Darwin operating system, while an enhanced version of CUPS with Apple's Aqua user interface will be provided with MacOS X."
It seems that the company that wrote cups has a interesting business model. It is licensing CUPS to non-GPL friendly companies (EG. Anything that is not a Linux distro.) , and that is how it plans to make money. Apple like most of the *BSD's, prefers to touch GPL software with a ten foot pole.
You could try the alpha version of my own printing system which I've written in Perl after three attempts to get CUPS to work ended in failure. I use it to print across the network to my Epson S.P. 1290.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
Well, they're certaintly not encouraging anyone to port their OSX apps to Linux or BSD. I wouldn't mind Quicktime player or iTunes or iPhoto or iDVD or Aqua or their Display PS drivers or Applescript on Linux, and this doesn't even touch on encouraging third parties to port their apps over. Granted, they've got the Darwin stuff and QT Streaming Server, but that doesn't help us all that much. Hell, all the Darwin people are just running XFree anyhow.
This brings up a fairly interesting point though. Why is it that we as a community don't encourage ports to Linux? When we lack an app, it's always a replacement we want. I just downloaded a game called "egoboo" for Linux, and it's a really nicely done 3d nethack type game. When I opened up the readme file though, it said it was for Direct3D! Someone has ported a great piece of work for the community. Why don't we encourage more people to write their programs using Qt and OpenGL and SDL so that we can make use of them too? Shareware/Freeware authors want a wide audience, and encouraging the use of cross-platform stuff could be a real boon to us all. Perhaps a motion to do this is what we need to start with? I mean, Apple sure as hell isn't going to encourage anyone to port stuff to Linux, we'll have to do it ourselves.
What do you guys think? I know classically, Linux versions of apps generally suck, like the Kazaa Linux crap for instance. But what about other programs? I'd love to see Triallian personally. Any thoughts?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."