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With Push for OS X Focus, CUPS Printing May Suffer On Other Platforms
CUPS is the popular open-source printing system that many projects have used successfully as a core, for desktop printing and as the basis of dedicated print servers. Reader donadony writes with word that Apple "has chosen to abandon certain Linux exclusive features, [while] continuing with popular Mac OS X features. The changeover is being attempted by Apple to set new printing standards that will not require 'drivers' in the future." However, as this message from Tim Waugh at Red Hat points out, all is not lost: "Where they are of
use for the Linux environment, those orphaned features will continue to
be maintained at OpenPrinting as a
separate project."
True to open-source fashion, the missing features get maintained by somebody else. If Apple makes more problematic changes, my guess is that eventually CUPS will just be forked.
This is not a big deal. It would be with closed-source software were the vendor can force changes down user's throats.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They aren't breaking compatibility. They are simply moving features they don't need into a separately maintained project.
That's how OS X works now. We've gone through a bunch of printers at my office, and a variety of brands. Each one just needs a wifi password set, then the desktop lets us print to it with no question. It just appears in the list of available printers.
OS X comes with a long list of drivers installed. Apple would love to drop those, partly because it involves a lot of coordination with printer manufacturers. Little from the customer perspective would likely change.
Developers: We can use your help.
Postscript is proprietary. But there are languages like it which are open standards.
The big issue with postscript as a printer file format is that the printer makes runtime choices. So for example printer fonts are used and fonts don't need to be included. Which effects both the look of the page and the spacing. Because computations can be done on the printer print times with postscript are inconsistent. That is why in commercial environments postscript is ripped to something like IPDS before being sent to an actual physical printer.
So the very flexibility that makes postscript "driverless" is also what makes it a poor choice for document consistency. Adobe itself saw the problem in that when it switched the page definition standard to pdf which was from a printer language perspective a downgrade.
Apple bought the source code for CUPs back in 2007 and hired its main developer.
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/07/07/12/1342258/cups-purchased-by-apple-inc