Apple buys cups

One of the more strongly discussed bits of news over the last week is the announcement that Apple has bought CUPS (the Common Unix Printing system) and hired Michael Sweet, the project's primary developer. Indeed, this deal happened back in February; it just took a little while for the people involved to get around to telling the rest of the world about it. There is a great deal of concern over what this deal might mean, though most of it is probably unnecessary. Still, there are some lessons to be learned here.

CUPS is an important part of our core infrastructure. Those of us who can think back to the days of trying to create lpr input and output filters to make a specific printer work can only be thankful that CUPS came along. It could easily be said that lpr lasted at least ten years longer than it should have, but, over that time, there were no real attempts to create a viable alternative. Projects like LPRng were mostly trying to create a slightly better version of the same thing. Then, there was the print system which Sun inflicted on users of early Solaris releases (who, as your editor can attest, were already suffering enough as it was); replacing that system with some version of lpr was a common thing to do. It took CUPS to implement contemporary printing protocols, support current hardware, and generally make the life of printer administrators easier - though, as any administrator who has lost a day to an obscure printer problem will say, things could get a lot better yet.

CUPS has always been a corporate-owned free software project, meaning that it carries all of the potential problems that any other such project has. When a single company owns a project it can strongly control its development direction, take the code private, grant license exemptions at will, abruptly sell the code to somebody else, and so on. Many companies which own projects do many of these things. Dealing with corporations has its risks; it has often been said that the corporate personality is best compared to that of a schizophrenic adolescent. Even so, such relationships have worked out well for the free software community with very few exceptions.

In this case, the ownership of CUPS has been passed from Easy Software Products (ESP) to Apple. Since contributors to CUPS are required to assign the copyrights to their work, ESP was entirely within its rights to make this sale. There are few constraints on what Apple can do with this externally-contributed code in the future; if it chooses, the company could certainly treat the code in ways that the original authors would not like. This risk is inherent in the transfer of copyrights; any free software developer who is contemplating signing a copyright transfer agreement should always think hard about who the receiving party is and what they could do in the future. The usual rule for dealing with companies - assume the person you negotiated the deal with will be immediately replaced by somebody who hates you - applies in this sort of situation.

The worst thing that Apple can do, in any case, is to take future releases of CUPS private. The current, GPL-licensed releases will remain available and free. Should this happen, the community will have to pick up from the last free version and create a fork; it certainly would not be the first time such an action proved to be necessary. For now, though, the announcement of the sale says "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I [Mr. Sweet] will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple." Given that certain aspects of CUPS development - supporting hundreds of printers, for example - are best done in the community setting, it is not hard to believe that this state of affairs could continue indefinitely.

Apple just might create enhanced versions of CUPS for its own operating system or as a commercial product. The company has already published a GPL exception policy allowing proprietary derived products to be made from CUPS - as long as they are distributed exclusively for Apple's operating systems. So Apple's version of CUPS might have shinier widgets or a few more printer drivers. Not the best of situations, but it is not all that different from the rights Sun gives itself with the OpenOffice.org code base. OpenOffice.org lacks features, fonts, and clip art found in StarOffice, but few OpenOffice.org users have complained that they felt cheated. Companies like MySQL make a nice living selling GPL exceptions to GPL-licensed code, including code contributed by outsiders.

The real threat, perhaps, is that Mr. Sweet will find himself carrying a lot of Apple-specific responsibilities (his statement in the sale announcement carefully did not say how much he would continue working on CUPS) and that the rate of outside contributions might slow as developers worry about what Apple might do. That could significantly slow the rate at which CUPS moves forward, to the community's cost.

One other potential problem is the CUPS trademark policy which has been announced by Apple. It requires permission to use the CUPS name with any derived product; a distributor who applies any patches at all, even security fixes, would be affected by this policy. The good news here is that, if this policy becomes a problem, the name of the print system could be changed to "mugs" or some such and few users would even notice.

On the other hand, what this deal might do is bring more resources to the development of CUPS and contributions from a company which, for all its faults, is known to pay a great deal of attention to the end user's experience. Development could speed up and head in directions which make CUPS easier to use than it is now. That would be an outcome which would be hard to complain about.

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