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Patent Applications Hint Apple Wants To Eliminate Printer Drivers

Posted by timothy on from the from-anywhere-is-a-nice-ideal dept.

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."

4 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. postscript by PineGreen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wasn't postscript supposed to solve these problems 20 years ago?

    1. Re:postscript by MBCook · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And it did a great job. Aren't the patents on PostScript expired by now? And the microprocessor and memory needed to run it is now dirt cheap.

      Years ago getting printers to work on Linux was a major pain, and often the output didn't look that great. But if you had a postscript printer, it was a 3 second setup. Quite a bit like configuring a real SoundBlaster for Linux compared to some no-name 3rd party piece of junk.

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    2. Re:postscript by CAIMLAS · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wrong. Apple did no such thing. CUPS has been around as open source since 1997 - the GPL, to be precise:

      Michael Sweet, who owns Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999.[3] 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.[4] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[5]

      And you seem to be implying that Apple open sourced Webkit, etc. (BSD? anything else you'd like to make wild claims about?) as well? Bull fucking shit. Webkit originated in KDE (more or less, it may have heritage beyond that). OpenCL is indeed Apple, but it's not open source, either.

      Did Apple make Samba, Apache, and Postscript, too? (The answer is no.) Apple is no "proponent" of "open source"; they're a proponent of free software. There is a huge, huge difference, particularly when they are the sole financial benefactor involved.

      I'm so sick and tired of Apple fanboys saying "it was done on the mac, first!" when the reality is often quite different. Apple gets credit for improving upon CUPS, sure. But not much beyond that (and even that is tenuous to argue).

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  2. Re:mmmm by Goaway · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.