AppleInsider Staff
Financial terms of the deal, which was completed back in February and noted by MacRumors on Thursday, were not made public.
In a posting to the official CUPS website earlier this week, the software's original author Michael Sweet said he was hired by Apple as part of the deal, but will continue to develop and release the software under its existing GPL2/LGPL2 license.
CUPS, which stands for Common Unix Printing System, is a modular printing system for Unix-like operating systems that allows a computer to act as a powerful print server.
Computers running CUPS act as host machines that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer. The software is comprised of a print spooler and scheduler, a filter system that converts the print data to a format that the printer will understand, and a backend system that sends this data to the print device.
Apple, which had started to develop its own printing system from scratch about six years ago, shelved plans for the proprietary software in 2002 and adopted CUPS outright. The Cupertino-based company has since used CUPS as the printing system of choice for its Mac OS X operating system, beginning with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.
In making his deal with Apple public this week, Sweet also issued a frequently asked questions page with details regarding the change of ownership of the printing software.
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
Thomas Sibilly
Andrew O'Hara
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Marko Zivkovic
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele
20 Comments
Huge. This will be in Leopard no doubt. How come it took us five months to hear about it?
i hope this will lead to better printing drivers for Mac. personally i'd love to see a unified printing utility that slaves oem drivers and takes care of all the 'workarounds' in the background. this would certainly help all Mac users who are using their workstations for graphics and art output to dedicated desktop and wide format printers (Epson, HP, Canon etc)
Glad to see Apple serious about printing in OS X.
And also supporting open source developers. I like to hear news like this, thanks for posting.
Huge. This will be in Leopard no doubt. How come it took us five months to hear about it?
?!?!
What will be in Leopard?
Dave
Apple Inc., in an apparent bid to bolster the printing services of its Mac OS X operating system, has acquired both the source code and author of the unix-based CUPS modular printing solution.
Financial terms of the deal, which was completed back in February and noted by MacRumors on Thursday, were not made public.
In a posting to the official CUPS website earlier this week, the software's original author Michael Sweet said he was hired by Apple as part of the deal, but will continue to develop and release the software under its existing GPL2/LGPL2 license.
CUPS, which stands for Common Unix Printing System, is a modular printing system for Unix-like operating systems that allows a computer to act as a powerful print server.
Computers running CUPS act as host machines that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer. The software is comprised of a print spooler and scheduler, a filter system that converts the print data to a format that the printer will understand, and a backend system that sends this data to the print device.
Apple, which had started to develop its own printing system from scratch about six years ago, shelved plans for the proprietary software in 2002 and adopted CUPS outright. The Cupertino-based company has since used CUPS as the printing system of choice for its Mac OS X operating system, beginning with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.
In making his deal with Apple public this week, Sweet also issued a frequently asked questions page with details regarding the change of ownership of the printing software.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]