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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.

1 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. 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.