Posted on 07/20/2007 1:36:17 PM PDT by N3WBI3
Apple Inc. isn't just a user of the CUPS, or Common UNIX Printing System, now the company is the owner, too. Michael Sweet, creator of CUPS, revealed on Wednesday that Apple purchased the printing system source code and brought him onboard as an employee in February 2007.
Apple uses CUPS for part of the printing system in Mac OS X, and with the purchase of the source code, that isn't likely to change.
CUPS was developed by Mr. Sweet under the GPL2/LGPL2 license, commonly used for free and open source software. He claims that Apple will continue to offer CUPS through the same licensing scheme, which means that developers should be able to use the CUPS system just as they always have.
Mr. Sweet also said that he will continue to develop and support CUPS as an Apple employee.
Thought this might interest you..
What do they gain by this? Don’t get me wrong. If they want to buy it and license it the same, CUPS users only stand to gain by the fact that it has good financial backing. But what does Apple get? Even if they wanted to make changes and the original coder wouldn’t accept them, they could just fork the project. If they could hire the original project head to work on it, they could have hired someone else. The only reason I can think of is that they want some major changes made and they want those changes to become part of the de facto *NIX printing platform.
They gain the copyrights to the code, and control over future developments of the main branch. Sure the guy could fork it but he cant call it CUPS when he does. This, I think, is similar to when Redhat acquired JBoss..
Well, sounds OK to me. I have some issues with CUPS, and if Apple can improve the system, and lets face it, Apple is pretty good at making software that is user friendly, then everyone benefits, including Apple. And Apple gets brownie points out in *nix land.
Even money says Apple wont “upgrade” the license to GPL 3, though.
Good, The less weight GPL3 gets the better it is considerably better than its first draft but it goes so far to protect users that it starts to pinch developers..
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