So why did Apple need CUPS? [LWN.net]

So why did Apple need CUPS?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:58 UTC (Thu) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105)
Parent article: Apple buys cups

What is Apple replacing with CUPS? I hear a lot of propaganda about how OS X is simple to use compared to GNU/Linux and how Free Software sucks in usability terms, so how come Apple didn't develop a superior situation in-house?

Or are they buying reverse-engineered, hand-created, community originated PPDs which they'll slot into their own framework?

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So why did Apple need CUPS?

Posted Jul 31, 2007 10:29 UTC (Tue) by dr_lha (guest, #86) [Link]

The simple answer to this is that the current Mac OS X printing subsystem is CUPS, and a fairly vanilla version at that. Apple basically have just bought the rights to the solution they already use in house.

Most of the Unix stuff in Mac OS X is the same stuff you use on Linux, it just has a pretty front end to make things easy (much like, for example, KDE implements a pretty front end to CUPS).