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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. Does GPL define handling of contributed code? by tji · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It seems that Apple bought the code and now control the license to the CUPS source code, giving them control of the direction (of at least that fork) and protection from licensing changes that hurt them.

    But, a question for this situation, and many others in the Open Source community is: "What about the code contributed by other people to the project?"

    Does the GPL define how this is handled? E.G. does the original author retain full copyright over the codebase and the contributor is in effect donating code to him? Or, does the copyright fragment, and each individual owns the copyright to the pieces they created?

    Or, is this not covered by the GPL, and is negotiated among the contributors?