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

Re:RMS Proofing

[Corwn of Amber]

I think you're right.

I must however add that CUPS has always been a torture to get working. (How do YOU add a local printer to the local setup using only the Web intardface ? Answer : either you use that http service to hack into your own machine, or you start a terminal and type sudo vim /etc/cups/cups.conf. Then you pray, read the Bible (man cups.conf) and get to work. Maybe someday your prints will come...

Apple has made CUPS painless. And if open source devs could never do that, then Apple devs are better devs, end of story. And as long as CUPS remains GPLv2, I really don't care who wites the code. Make it JUST WORK.

"MAKE IT JUST WORK" should have its own telethon, so that F/OSS devs could happily code away in their mom's basements, in their offices during or after hours, and the benefits of the show be given away to other dev teams, paid only to Make It Just Work.

And we would not depend on Apple finishing the half-baked jobs FOSS devs do. Sorry, guys, a product I can't use is worth zero, and thus never compares with any other software, Free, free, or other.
I'll go back to Linux when my sensors and everything else work right out of the box. You know what? I found an OS that does exactly that to absolute perfection and beyond : BSD-based Mac OSX. First time I tried to install it on my box (pure Intel + nVidia setup), first time took about four hours, including setup, drivers and configuring every app I've been using in Linux or its local equivalent (which I had to learn to use). I used to spend more time than that every week to clean my Windows XP, or daily figuring out how every other Linux app I need works in a different way that that of every other.
Never going back to Windows. Vista refused to work - only once, on the very first time I used it, in so disruptive a way that I'll never ever touch it again. If my workplace forces me to use $REAL_APP I'll build them a Mac. At one fourth of Apple prices, of course. Where REAL_APP is either "Microsoft *" or "Adobe *" or both. (What else do you need Windows for, anyway? Games. What else?)