Slashdot Mirror
Patent Applications Hint Apple Wants To Eliminate Printer Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has filed two patent applications that describe an approach as well as file formats and APIs to eliminate the printer driver as a requirement for users to access a printer and print documents. If the company has its way, there will be three ways to access a printer in the future: The first will be via a conventional software driver. The second will be via a cloud service and the third will be via a driverless access method that supports 'universal' printing from any type device."
Wasn't postscript supposed to solve these problems 20 years ago?
As we're all aware, one of the problems with the patent system is that patents don't always equal products. How many times has an Apple patent made the news with no product to show for it? How many people missed the iPhone because they weren't paying attention to the right patents?
That being said, this is WAY more plausible given Apple's work with CUPS and AirPrint.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
So, Apple's setting out to solve the print driver problem right when they're making tablets so popular that we don't need hard copy anymore.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://xkcd.com/927/
Nearly all consumers want CHEAP printers. That means that the translation from text/image to printer imaging codes is done in the computer, not the printer, which saves CPU power and memory in the printer. Look at the difference in price between the typical Windows printer and the Postscript ('specially color) printers. A Windows printer only has to buffer a few raster lines, using the processing power and memory of the host computer, while the Postscript printer has to buffer the entire page, since there could be a command at the end of the page that places something at the top.
Add to this the insanity of any/all software and process patents and it is absolutely in the printer manufacturers' interest to tie the raster-defining codes into obscure and NDA-protected proprietary drivers to avoid tripping over some patent that says " a one bit in this field says put a green dot next on the page".
* With iOS
Printer drivers are necessary in many cases because non-Apple printer vendors support a very wide and differing feature set.
You are aware that the sets "non-Apple printer vendors", at least in the sense of "printer vendors other than Apple", and "printer vendors" are the same? I.e., there are no Apple printers.
This might be one of those patents that a company like Apple files for defense purposes especially with their CUPS and Bonjour work
THEIR CUPS?
Michael Sweet, who owns Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999. The original design of CUPS used the LPD protocol, but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux.[citation needed] In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2. In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.
Cups was Open Source for 6 years before Apple supposedly bought it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
it was a closed source printer driver that made Richard Stallman invent the GNU/FOSS software movement, if not for his nemesis GNU would never have been born...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
so like a standard Printer Control Language or maybe some sort of Script for Posting thins to a printer... I wish someone would have thought of that sooner.
No, nothing like that. As noted in this comment, there are a lot of cheap non-PostScript printers out there; in the scheme described in the patent, a printer could say "hey, I do PostScript" and the print system could send PostScript to the printer, just as it could say "hey, I do JPEG" and, if what's being printed is a JPEG image, the print system could send the JPEG to the printer, or it could say "hey, I do PDF" and the print system could send a PDF to the printer, or it could say "hey, I only do raster images" and the print system could generate raster images and send them to the printer.
Excuse me, but Apple didn't buy the Cups source code, which would be quite pointless because it is GPL licensed. Apple bought the copyright to the Cups source code. And not "supposedly" but really.
It's Patent Application 20110194140 ; here's the application.
And, yes, that's Michael "Mr. CUPS" Sweet in the Inventors list.
Given that they already open sourced CUPS, and don't have any profit in printers, it's more likely than not they would simply open source it like OpenCL, CUPS, Webkit, etc.
Apple developed OpenCL and open-sourced it under the permissive GPL. Kudos for that.
However, CUPS existed and was open-source for years before Apple adopted it in 2002 (they did not create it).
Webkit is a fork of the KHTML library which is and was under the LGPL, and thus Apple had no choice over open-sourcing it and releasing it under a permissive license.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
USB printer class doesn't describe the language that the printer uses, only the way that print data is transported between the host and printer. It's designed to encapsulate any form of print data, be it PostScript, PCL, or something proprietary.
Like I say, it was open source GPL in many different Linux distros for years before Apple got involved.
Since it was GPL, just what did Apple buy? Oh, they bought the developer. Figuratively and Literally,
and pretty much induced him to walk away from his own GPL declaration "Just for them"..
Copyright 1997-2006 by Easy Software Products
44141 AIRPORT VIEW DR STE 204
HOLLYWOOD, MARYLAND 20636 USA
Voice: +1.301.373.9600
Email: cups-info@cups.org
WWW: http://www.cups.org/
Introduction
The Common UNIX Printing System^TM, ("CUPS^TM"), is provided under the
GNU General Public License ("GPL") and GNU Library General Public
License ("LGPL"), Version 2, with exceptions for Apple operating
systems and the OpenSSL toolkit. A copy of the exceptions and licenses
follow this introduction.
The GNU LGPL applies to the CUPS and CUPS Imaging libraries located in
the "cups" and "filter" subdirectories of the CUPS source distribution
and in the "cups" include directory and library files in the binary
distributions. The GNU GPL applies to the remainder of the CUPS
distribution, including the "pdftops" filter which is based upon Xpdf.
For those not familiar with the GNU GPL, the license basically allows
you to:
* Use the CUPS software at no charge.
* Distribute verbatim copies of the software in source or binary
form.
* Sell verbatim copies of the software for a media fee, or sell
support for the software.
What this license does not allow you to do is make changes or add
features to CUPS and then sell a binary distribution without source
code. You must provide source for any changes or additions to the
software, and all code must be provided under the GPL or LGPL as
appropriate. The only exceptions to this are the portions of the CUPS
software covered by the Apple operating system license exceptions
outlined later in this license agreement.
The GNU LGPL relaxes the "link-to" restriction, allowing you to develop
applications that use the CUPS and CUPS Imaging libraries under other
licenses and/or conditions as appropriate for your application, driver,
or filter.
License Exceptions
In addition, as the copyright holder of CUPS, Easy Software Products
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If you buy the copyright to a GPL'd work, it is yours. You can change the license to anything you want. You can't change the already released versions, of course, but anything from that point onwards is entirely up to you.
While a standardization of features could make ti so you don't need a 3rd part driver for simple things, you still need a driver and you need a more complex one for full support.
If you want to see an area where this has happened, look at audio on Windows. Microsoft laid out the specs for the Universal Audio Architecture. As the name implies, it is a set of audio standards. For Vista and later, to get the logo you need to have a sound card that complies with it to the extent that it can function with no drivers outside of the base UAA driver that comes with Windows.
Works too, those Realtek HD chips that are so popular on motherboards just work as UAA devices right after install. These days, a good bit of after market cards do as well.
However, for all that, Realtek still has drivers on their site. Why? Because the default UAA supports only a basic set of features. If you want support for everything, you have to get their driver.
So it works and all that, and I'm not saying it is a bad idea to have standards such that you don't need additional drivers for basic support. But geeks at least do need to understand that there is still a driver, it is just one included with the OS, and that it is just basic support, you'll need custom stuff to fully support all features.
Monochrome is pretty easy to do with PDF. Duplex might be a bit trickier.