In February of 2007, Apple Inc. acquired ownership the CUPS source code and hired me (Michael R Sweet), the creator of CUPS.CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple.
This is interesting, and a smart idea for Apple. By taking a system that is compatible with an extremely large number of systems and making it part of MacOSX, Apple has made OSX out of the box more compatible with printers then Windows.
For those that aren’t sure what I’m talking about, CUPS is the default OpenSource printing system used by most linux distributions. With it you can print to just about any printer you can imagine… no need to “install drivers” in most cases. Plus since OSX is actually BSD Unix based, it isn’t much work to have it working with OSX. I think the main reason Apple bought it was that this way he can be paid to focus on some Apple products, and making it work really well under OSX.
Tags: Apple, Finance, Financial, Technology
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