CUPS Purchased By Apple Inc.

Rick Richardson writes to note a posting on cups.org that reveals that Apple, which in 2002 first licensed CUPS for printing in OS X, purchased the source code last February and hired its main developer, Michael R. Sweet. Sweet writes: "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple." There are no comments on the post. What exactly did Apple purchase? It was and is an open source project. Trademarks aren't mentioned.

Comments

Trademarks Mentioned Here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L180+I0+TFAQ+M10+ P1+Q

Apple Inc. has trademarked the Common UNIX Printing System, CUPS, and CUPS logo. These names and logos may be used freely in any direct port or binary distribution of CUPS. To use them in derivative products, please contract Apple Inc. for written permission. Our intention is to protect the value of these trademarks and ensure that any derivative product meets the same high-quality standards as the original.

"What exactly did Apple purchase?"

[R2.0]

"What exactly did Apple purchase? It was and is an open source project. Trademarks aren't mentioned. "

Perhaps, oh, the source code? Just like it says?

Under the GPL, the author does NOT give up his rights to do whatever the hell he wants with the code, including sell it. The GPL simply grants others the right to copy and distribute the code, subject to certain limitations.

Now Apple owns the copyright to the code. They can take it closed, relicense it, dual license it, or use it for ass paper. But the stuff already release under the GPL remains there. Why is any of this so hard to understand?

Re:Open source != Public Domain

[Constantine XVI]

Except that Sweet required that copyrights for all code be transferred to his company.

Re:GPL License Exceptions

[hysterion]

You may therefore distribute linked combinations of the CUPS imaging library with Apple OS-Developed Software without releasing the source code of the Apple OS-Developed Software.

Note, this exception has been there for the last 5 years:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/05/msg00 033.html

Re:RMS Proffing

[vslashg]

I have little doubts that Apple will try to use/make another compiler as soon as they can so they can avoid having to share their changes. Indeed, Apple is active in the LLVM project, a non-copyleft optimizing compiler backend. Currently, to make any real-world use of it, you have to use GCC as the frontend, but Apple is working on that problem, too.

Re:Apple's History with "Open Source"

[Ilgaz]

" For example, integrating colorsync or letting the gui die from benign neglect as Apple adds code that breaks the gui."

Apple will correct colours whatever opportunity they will have. Even their Windows Safari comes with colour correction. Colorsync is all XML based format and Apple is not Pantone, never said they can't use/implement Colorsync. In fact in early days of Mozilla while nobody cares about it except few remaining Netscape fans, they offered Colorsync free to it. It took 5-6 years for the current Firefox finally implement it. Dozens of DTP professionals, credible graphics artists and even companies like IBM feedback didn't help to take it serious.

"I'd like to hear from some people who work on Konqueror how much Apple is contributing. "

I was on webkit channel for a while, all I saw is Apple Inc. coders giving up everything they have in hand and helping free /opensource OS developers to implement/manage webkit compile process on other operating systems. Forget that, the Konqueror 4 in KDE 4 will have very very similar rendering engine with Safari.

Another thing. Webkit reviewers http://webkit.org/blog/95/lots-of-new-reviewers/

"Lars Knoll - Lars is the original creator of KHTML, and has been doing a lot of work in the WebKit tree to port it back to Qt, and has also submitted some general refactoring patches and bug fixes. "

"Nikolas Zimmermann - Niko is the co-creator of KSVG2, with Rob Buis. In addition to all his original work on KSVG2 (and KDOM), Niko has been working in the WebKit tree for a while now, mostly on SVG fixes and improvements but also in other areas."

"George Staikos - New port reviewer for Qt port. George started the effort to port WebKit back to Qt, in the form of the Unity project."

As ordinary user, not a developer, I see Apple offers the core of Tiger operating system, launchd open source (really open) completely free and nobody implementing it to their distros.

I begun to suspect that "Apple never gives back to open source" is something similar to "one button mouse" never ending story.

Re:RMS Proffing

[Dan Ost]

Legally, I suppose it would be within your right to create a fork under GPL2 but ethically and morally it would be stealing since the original copyright holder (Michael R Sweet) was the main contributor and any other patch contributors assigned rights to him before they were included in the repository. You would basically be carrying out a coupe and violating the spirit of the license if not the letter of it by taking something none of you owned and creating a fork of it.

Bullshit. Taking the GPL2 codebase and forking it (still under the GPL2 since only the copyright owner can change the licensing) wouldn't be stealing at all. When CUPS was licensed under the GPL, the owner was declaring to the world that anyone is allowed to take the code and, within the rights granted by the GPL, do whatever they want with it. This includes forking.

Seriously, if the project hadn't been GPL'd in the first place, do you think it would have received such broad support from the community and gotten where it is today functionality-wise?

Re:Was it really open source?

[ChaosDiscord]

You appear to be confused. How does Adobe "own" PostScript? The newer revisions may be hindered by patents, but the earlier language levels are decades old at this point and long past the point of having patents. The language is highly standardized and well documented.

That CUPS is "built around" PostScript is unsurprising, as it's been the Unix standard for printing for decades. Applications write PostScript and hand it off to a printer demon. And this is hardly a CUPS issue. If your printer natively handles PostScript, CUPS doesn't do any PostScript processing; it just merrily hands your input off to the printer. CUPS only cares if your printer doesn't support PostScript, in which case it hands the PostScript input to GNU GhostScript (another old open source product) which interprets the PostScript and converts it to something your printer can handle. If PostScript were somehow proprietary, I'm pretty sure the Free Software Foundation wouldn't be shipping GhostScript.