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.