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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.
They aren't breaking compatibility. They are simply moving features they don't need into a separately maintained project.
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.
Breaking compatibility for market advantage is so noble of them, clearly we all must approve.
Not every Linux distro includes every package by default. If you want to install the CUPS 1.6 package, or the filters for CUPS 1.5.x that are not supported by OS X you are free to do so.
I don't know if Apple will succeed with 'driverless printing', but if they do then every platform will benefit. Sometimes moving forward means letting go of some of the past.
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.
Slashdot and GPL zealots rant and rave all the time about how awesome it is to use OSS because you can 'fork it' ...
Yes, that is an advantage.
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.
Well, of course not. Forking is a pain in the neck and splits resources. Noone wants to do it if they can avoid it since it is really the last resort. However, sometimes it is necessary and works very well (LibroOffice, Xorg, uCLinux, CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT, firefox, to name a few).
Apparently in your bizarro-world it is better not to have the option as a last resort? Not sure I follow that "logic".
What you'd rather do is bitch about someone else not doing exactly what you want them to do, and giving it to you at no cost while you have nothing to do with any of their products.
Everyone likes to bitch. So what? You're bitching about free posts on slashdot.
You're not bitching because Apple is doing something wrong. You're bitching because they aren't continuing to give you a free ride which benefits them in absolutely no way what so ever. Its not even like they get any good will out of it from the OSS community, douche bags like yourself bitch no matter how much they contribute back. This is why you're group of zealots will always be ignored. You do nothing but bitch about free shit given to you out of good will.
People are bitching because it is kind of irritating: they took what was a big Linux project, took all the lead developers and are now breaking it. It's their right, and they've funded development up to now, but the result is now becoming irritating.
Or are you just suggesting that a company's reputation should get a free ride into the future based on what they did in the past?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If by efficiency you mean printer thoughput, I think you'd win your bet. I abandoned CUPS on the system that serves as the print server on home network. It turned out that most applications that generated PostScript output and sent it off to a CUPS client to print on a CUPS server resulted in turning my 20ppm printer into a 1ppm printer... if we were lucky. Ditching the CUPS server and reinstalling LPRng restored the printer's normal throughput. I still have the CUPS clients set up on various systems but as a print server CUPS was a dog.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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
Thanks for describing the OSX print subsystem. It's only in the Windows world that this isn't the case. Linux is variable, depending on how well CUPS is set up in the distro you're using.