Apple has purchased the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). CUPS is widely used by most UNIX and almost all Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
CUPS became the basis of the Mac’s printing system beginning with OS X version 10.2 (Jaguar).
According to Linux-Watch:
Previously, CUPS and its trademarks belonged to Easy Software Products, which was founded by Sweet to develop a 3-D modeling program for real-time displays called ESP Modeler. The need to print these models led Sweet to develop ESP Print. When it became apparent that ESP Print was the more popular of the programs, Sweet turned his attention to it. From his work on ESP Print came the concepts and technology that became CUPS.
Sweet licensed CUPS under the open-source GPL2/LGPL2. In his announcement of Apple buying CUPS, he said, “CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple.” In the past, Sweet also worked on other open-source programs such as Ghostscript and Samba.
Michael R. Sweet stated that he will work primarily on non-CUPS related projects at Apple. Apple now owns the names and logos for CUPS. Support for the current and future versions will remain as it has been. All major Linux distributors and Apple will continue to provide CUPS support. Free support at the CUPS Newsgroups will also continue.
We’ll have to see if there are eventual direction changes for CUPS. Apple’s Bonjour, zero configuration network protocol, may well figure strongly in the next versions.
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