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.
Even money says Apple wont “upgrade” the license to GPL 3, though.