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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."
Apple is not the developer of CUPS. Apple bought CUPS back in 2007 and hired its main developer.
CUPS is an example of the sort of hairy mess that open-source developers don't like to deal with, like OpenSSL. It was the inspiration for Eric Raymond (the main guy of the Open Source movement) to scold the OSS community back in 2004. I think Eric Raymond's ire is misplaced; CUPS was uniquely horrible back then. But printing in Unix has always been bad, and CUPS made it much better than before, so everybody standardized on it.
Have a nice time.
Because it makes the printer a standalone computer and allows usage without the need of any extra driver, therefore not only your mac/pc but any smartphone, game console, electric car, smart rice cooker, etc can use it without support from the actual printer manufacturer. That is particular important as the number of computing platforms is increasing, and the cost to support every single one of them is not small. We've came in to an age that even a dollar ARM cortex M3 CPU can host a web server. Why not use this abundant extra computing power? Security? The incompetence with computers of strangers is not my concern.
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.
You've convince me! Your anecdotal experience is enough for me to believe that no one needs to print from mobile devices....
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.
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,
Yes that's why LLVM, Clang, OpenCL, Zero-Configuration, and WebKit only works on Apple machines.
and it would have been even more confusingly documented.
Yes because all open source software is meticulously documented.
It would never have become widely adopted across the Unix world, partly because Apple would not have chosen GPLv2.
Yes Apple would never choose GPLv2 unlike all the other GPLv2 software they've chosen to use.
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.
Yes Apple is EVIL for not completely changing the software they own to be proprietary and they are also EVIL for forking software they didn't own (WebKit). Face it folks, Apple can do no right.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.