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Apple Releases CUPS 2.0
kthreadd writes: 15 years after the release of CUPS 1.0, Apple has now released version 2.0 of the printing system for GNU/Linux and other Unix-style operating systems. One of the major new features in 2.0 is that the test program for ippserver now passes the IPP Everywhere self-certification tests. Also, they've made an interesting blog post looking at the past and future of printing. Since the first major release in 1999, printing has become much more personal. Printer drivers are going away, and mobile usage is now the norm."
All the links are to blogs and release-notes, but none of them (nor anywhere obvious on cups.org itself) actually has a download or instructions where to get it. New release sounds nice. Not usable if we can't get it, but "sounds nice", so at least it has that going for it.
Apple is not the developer of CUPS. Apple bought CUPS back in 2007 and hired its main developer.
So... the guy that works on it is hired by Apple, and the project is owned and financed by Apple. Isn't that essentially the same as Apple develops CUPS?
No. If Apple had developed it, it would not have had any command-line interface except for XML files and the "defaults" program, its interfaces would have been proprietary to Apple, and it would have been even more confusingly documented. It would never have become widely adopted across the Unix world, partly because Apple would not have chosen GPLv2. Instead, Lennart Poettering would have been so in awe of it that he would have created his own unstable version of it, which would immediately have been adopted across the Linux distributions to the exclusion of any other printing system, because Lennart is the best programmer and all crashes are everybody else's fault. It would have stabilized when he got bored and started copying another Apple innovation. Like, say, launchd.
CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.
Have a nice time.
The recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities were just the nail in the coffin. It was more a matter of limited developer resources and the relative difficulty of implementing certification validation with the OpenSSL APIs vs. GNU TLS. (and don't forget we also support SecureTransport on OS X and Schannel on Windows...)
Much better to focus on making support for one popular TLS library on Linux/*BSD than to do a half-assed job for two libraries, one of which has known vulnerabilities and API/forking issues.
I print, therefore I am.
I not-uncommonly print event tickets, shipping labels and recipes from my phone and tablet (my phone or tablet display recipes fine, but I'll invariably spill something on them if I have them near me while cooking so I prefer something disposable). While I could always fire up the desktop, my smartphone is usually right at my fingertips. While it's not a very frequent use, mobile device printing is convenient enough that I appreciate having the feature.
The web server serves as a non graphical front-end too.
You can ssh into the piece of crap computer with parallel port laser printer attached, and run elinks from there.
That's the power of web 1.0 for you.