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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."
Is that what those big things full of paper next to the computer were? Haven't used one in years...
We must maintain, at all costs, beloved technological anachronisms like printer incompatibilities and X11. Shame on Apple! Shame on them for trying to rid computing of all its cruft.
If print drivers were to be eliminated across the board, half of our IT staff would no longer be needed. Fix the issues with stuck sensors, paper jams, etc and we'd be down to three people.
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.
...I can plug in a printer to my computer and without a single dialog box ever coming up asking/telling me about configuration, drivers, or anything else other than asking how many copies do I want, they need to keep trying.
Printers have been stuck in the early 80s for the last three decades.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Breaking compatibility for market advantage is so noble of them, clearly we all must approve.
With the horsepower available to cheap microcontrollers and cheap memory today, why isn't Postscript (or even PCL) standard on all printers? That would reduce the printer drivers to a single ppd file. Head cleaning, alignment and such could be accomplished through carefully written PS.
...this is not news but rather simply an FYI.
I'm reading this it doesn't sound like Linux vs. OSX so much as Apple having declared a new standard deprecating the old standard. Apple is typically aggressive about that sort of thing moreso than Microsoft. I think a fair description is that Apple is aggressively pushing the new standard, while the Linux community would prefer a slightly less aggressive push.
For example avahi (the Linux equivalent of Bonjour) will now be essentially mandatory for CUPS discovery, unlike before where CUPS systems would discover each other independently. Making Bonjour / avahi mandatory is not breaking Linux, Linux has avahi every bit as much as OSX has Bonjour, it is simply moving CUPS aggressively towards a situation where discovery uses the new standard not the ad-hoc CUPS standard. (as an aside new versions of avahi using DNS-SD are required).
The Linux community has a long tradition of complex dependency chains for full functionality. This is more unusual for BSD than for Linux and IMHO not really harmful to either. I think there is an interesting argument to be had about how aggressive to be about deprecating standards in the Unix software ecosystem and how much software should be independent. But this post confuses far to many issues to be helpful.
https://www.xkcd.com/927/
I'm not sure, but it seems relevant here.
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
It depends on the license and the copyright holder.
If GPL and the project does not have copyright assigned to the vendor, then they must release the source to anyone they provide the binary and grant them rights to redistribute with modifications. They cannot do patches to the binary, but they can do things like isolate the GPL code into a different application and keep proprietary content indpendent of the code.
If a BSD-like license, they can generally ship without source code. Attribution is usually the main requirement.
If the project is comprised entirely of content written by the vendor or with copyright assigned to the vendor, they can do pretty much whatever the hell they want. They can't reneg on distributed BSD or GPL content so a variant of the project may always be open, but they can close the source or change the licensing terms of new copies all they want.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In that when you go to a store, they will tell you, that doesn't work on a MAC, but it does on Windows.
Slashdot and GPL zealots rant and rave all the time about how awesome it is to use OSS because you can 'fork it' ... funny how any time the situation arises where forking would get you right back to the state you desire ... no one wants to do it.
You may want to look into the software projects MariaDB and LibreOffice.
People bitched about Oracle to no end on this site when both of those forks were announced
Considering MariaDB was forked before Oracle bought Sun, I'm pretty sure they haven't.
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I presume you don't read many scientific papers. Reading them on fondleslabs is a pain in the tookus. Hardcopy is handy, you can take it anywhere, it never runs low on power, and it is easy on your eyes. It is also wonderful for scribbling in margin notes. You can lend or give someone the paper easily, no DRM to fight.
Mind you I would rather keep my library of papers in digital format, I have thousands. But for reading, there's nothing like hardcopy.
The article is based on speculation. One of the bits of speculation, that CUPS would do away with PPD support, shows a lack of knowledge about how CUPS works on OS X and how the driverless print system (to support iOS devices) works. Namely, the PPDs are still required for the printer server (computer) to setup the printer with the appropriate features, color spaces, etc. CUPS requires a filter to translate the driverless print job (PDF or JPEG) to the raster protocol used by the device as specified in the PPD. For OS X, it's true that it's Quartz and Linux the filters will be different, but this is not so different than how it's been all along anyway.
The one thing that does ring true, however, would be moving from CUPS' proprietary CUPS-to-CUPS automatic discovery protocol to Zeroconf (Bonjour). There's a whole number of reasons that would make sense (for Linux just as much as OS X).