Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

CUPS Purchased By Apple Inc.

Posted by kdawson on from the carry-on-printing-as-before dept.

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.

4 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RMS Proffing by fsmunoz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It uses GCC, but they hate it, or better yet, they hate that they have to use a product under the GPL. Steve Jobs tried to get special rights from the FSF to use GCC in NextStep, and the FSF said no, never. So, NeXT used GCC - the runtime part of Objective-C was proprietary though - and had to share the Objective-C support. 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.

  2. Re:RMS Proffing by OldeTimeGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful
    In what way was it hostile? Apple offered to pay the primary developer for his rights. He agreed.

    You may not like Apple bought the rights or you may not like that the developer "sold out", but unless Apple applied some type of pressure that was neither written about nor implied by TFA, how was the transaction hostile?

  3. Re:RMS Proffing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wait, what? How can some fork and relicense as GPL v3? The current license is GPL/LGPL v2 only. Without the "or later" clause, wouldn't that be a license violation? Am I missing something?

  4. Don't give up your copyright to a single person by GnarlyDoug · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The real issue for open source development I see was that Sweet violated an implicit understanding. Everyone transferred their copyrights to him, but there was the idea that the project was open source. How many of those developers would have done the work if they knew or thought Sweet would do this? I bet many of them would not have contributed. By giving up their copyright they lost their entire stake in the matter.

    The real lesson here is that the idea that the developers should pool their copyrights into one person is flawed. That person can then cash out. The get all the profits for everyone else's work. The other developers lose out on both getting a piece of the pie if they would have wanted that, and they lose out in the moral sense in that if they didn't want their code to suddenly become part of a closed source project, they have no say in it anymore.

    I think that in the future open source developers should be more cautious about giving away their copyrights. Also, I hope that open source developers will start forking projects that are being developed by companies and groups that require that the copyright be transferred.