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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.

3 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe their server will work now. by saintlupus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The CUPS implementation in OS X server was such a total piece of shit, prone to lockups and meltdowns, that we have all of the Macs on our campus printing through a Debian box instead. Hopefully this will allow Apple to handle the sort of printer sharing that _every other NOS on earth_ has done for the last three decades.

    It's pretty bad when you're fucking something that simple up to a degree even Netware can't manage.

    --saint

  2. Re:CUPS web interface not up to par by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In fact the CUPS on OS X is so flawlessly working that nobody has clue they have "CUPS" or ever visited the famous 127.0.0.1:631 on their browser. I bet most would be surprised to see that page.

    I think now Apple in control, they may make it same way on Linux that only actual system admins would care about the CUPS interface and end users may have a similar feeling on Linux/FreeBSD.

    CUPS must be also used at large corporate Windows based hosts or anywhere that actually have a real postscript printer. I mean of course there must be a actual printing server running its Professional edition.

    This may really prove good for Linux and FreeBSD. Look how they made a Mach/NeXT/FreeBSD hybrid (OS X) usable.

  3. Re:RMS Proffing by shawnce · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As you note Apple is the one developing it so they can do what they want with it and so far I am not sure they have publicly specified the license it will live under and/or if it will be available for use by others (in a open / no cost sense).

    Given that they are pitching it to the LLVM community I would say a better then average chance exists that Apple will share while maintaining enough control over the project to ensure that it can fulfill their needs and ensure a high quality project (in otherwords get what they need with out triggering forking which can easily negate collaborative gains). Apple can benefit from assistance from others on a project like this.