CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. [LWN.net]

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 18:38 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577)
In reply to: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. by mheily
Parent article: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Recently we found out that we (at my workplace) were suddenly in
competition with one of our major suppliers. Up till recently, they sold
the equipment and parts, we purchased, installed and serviced them. Now
where we have their equipment, have maintained them, and invoiced the
customer, all of a sudden the equipment manufacturer is sending people to
do service and maintenance.

No problem, right? Any discussion within our offices could be described
as "retarded", right?

Apple has learned about our community. We like free things. We are
resource constrained. We want to get along, because we (generally) get
along and work to a common goal, and we want to believe that this is the
way things are done.

I'm sticking my neck out here. Unless the community comes up with
something that can force Apple to act differently, Apple will act in a
way that will hurt the free desktop. Not openly, not confrontationally.
By the time we realize what has happened, years will have passed. The
time it takes to build a community capable of doing CUPS is considerable.
So we will be years behind on a major aspect of our desktop.

The X hassle took years to become clear, and years to catch up. It still
is a ways from being satisfactory.

Is that ok with everyone? Maybe if we all think nice thoughts it will all
turn out well. Apple loves us all don't they?

Let me put this another way. What is the free desktop's leverage to make
this work well? I submit that the only leverage we have is the freedom of
the code. The only way I see it leveraged is by a fork. There may be
other ways, so let's hear them.

Derek

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CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 19:03 UTC (Fri) by mheily (subscriber, #27123) [Link]

What part of "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and [Michael R. Sweet] will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple" do you not understand?

If you think that Apple is such an evil freedom-hating company that the FOSS community cannot accept their ownership of the CUPS code, then go away and start your own fork of CUPS. You should also stop using GCC since Apple is a major contributor to GCC.

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 20:11 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Did Apple just buy the rights to GCC? Or is this analogy *really* strained?

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 14, 2007 5:36 UTC (Sat) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

Apple "contributed" to GCC because it would be fantastically more expensive to make their own compiler from scratch, and the GPL forced them to "contribute" the changes they made back. They contributed back the absolute minimum they felt was required under the GPL. The cocoa runtime and all that, for instance, is still all non-free.

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 14, 2007 11:38 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

That statement is nice and all, but is it legally binding?

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 16, 2007 4:39 UTC (Mon) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

I guess you don't understand the difference between contribution and
control.

Derek

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 17, 2007 11:36 UTC (Tue) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link]

I think you don't quite grasp the situation yourself.
I want to think that this is not going to be bad, but what that statement that you quote means in reality is pretty much only a guarantee that the community can still fork the project if it wants to.

Apple holds the copyright for the current CUPS source code now, so they are no longer bound by the GPL (they can use CUPS under any terms they want to and feed only the changes they feel like back into the GPL version).
On top of that, they have trademarked the name and logo as well as that they have the head CUPS developer on their payroll.

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 17, 2007 14:24 UTC (Tue) by mheily (subscriber, #27123) [Link]

This knee jerk anti-Apple crusade is a bunch of crap.

When people say they are going to do something, I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. The lead CUPS developer has said that nothing will change due to Apple's ownership of the copyright, and I think we should assume that he is telling the truth. Apple used to be a completely proprietary company, and I think it's great that they have embraced open-source software and are working with the open-source community providing enhancements to FreeBSD, KHTML, GCC, CUPS, and other projects.

Apple has *not* forked CUPS for their own internal use. There is only one CUPS source tree, and all of the changes Apple makes are being applied to the GPL version. There is no Apple-proprietary, non-GPL version. You can download the CUPS source code from Apple as part of the Darwin operating system (the open-source foundation that OS X is built upon).

Also, Apple has not been bound by the GPL since May of 2002 when the CUPS author added an exception to the GPL specifically for Apple's benefit. Prior to Apple's purchase, ESP held the trademarks and rights to the logo. I don't remember anyone making a big deal about it in the past.