Filed under: Apple Corporate, UNIX / BSD
Apple buys CUPS
Big UNIX news this morning. Apple has bought out CUPS, the common UNIX printing system. The name may not sound familiar, but it's part of every Mac OS X installation. CUPS implements a cross-platform printing system based on the Internet Printing Protocol and is, according to its web page, the defacto standard printing system for Linux. Until now, CUPS has been distributed by Easy Software Products under the GNU general public license. Although the purchase was announced today, it seems the actual deal went down this past February. In addition to acquiring the CUPS source code ownership, Apple has also hired Michael R. Sweet, its creator. CUPS will retain its GNU GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms and Sweet intends to continue maintaining and supporting the product. FAQs about the change of ownership can be found here. As our own Mike Rose points out, the license exceptions seem to allow third party plug-in developers to keep their source code private. Developers (including Apple) can distribute derivative work and be exempt from the mandatory source code release clauses of the GNU GPL so long as the exception is limited to Mac OS X and not for use on other operating systems. Just remember: we are not lawyers, and the exception language is convoluted.
Thanks, Daniel.
Update: Nilay Patel from Engadget adds: Apple isn't affected by the license terms of CUPS, since they own it. A license only affects licensees, not owners. Apple could fork CUPS and close the source tomorrow and no one could do anything about it, although I'm certain the terms of the sale included a promise that Apple would keep it GPL'd for a certain period of time. The exception appears to be geared to printer manufacturers so they can write drivers and not have to open their code -- which is interesting, since the GPL already provides a mechanism for this sort of distribution, called the "mere aggregation" clause.. Disclaimer: Although Nilay is a lawyer, this information is not legal advice or analysis and should not be construed as such. Thanks Nilay.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kitty said 12:51PM on 7-12-2007
I'm guessing this means more PC only compatible printers with OS X?
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John Laur said 1:19PM on 7-12-2007
I imagine in some sense this is a move to protect CUPS against moving to the GPLv3; its a very large component of OS X and they would be foolish to give up their printing subsystem to a license change. Their source changes to CUPS are probably too deep to be allowed by the new license should CUPS have elected to use it.
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osxuser2 said 3:42PM on 7-12-2007
OH... YEAH!!!!!!!!!!
Thank goodness!
Now Apple get me my HP F series drivers.
Work with Linksys to work with thier wireless print servers too!
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Michel said 7:20PM on 7-12-2007
but gpl source code is good for consumers (you)
and the gpl3 patents clauses are here to protect the DEVELOPPERS and AUTHORS of the source code (the one wanting to put HIS/HER works under the gpl ) against predatory patents threats.
(the one taking you gpl works, adding some obscure new features protected by a patent and because of the patent, forbids users to use the new derivative until they pay a licence to use the patent, a way to proprietarize the work of the original authors WITHOUT his/her consent)
so, gpl 3 is _Good_ for authors and good for users hoping all contribution to the project will help it to stay free and open.
here, apple is simply trying to ease developpers of drivers and to give an advantage to os x.
it's good and bad. very difficult to have a definite opinion. I will wait to see.
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is it well possible some linux distros will fork or refuse to commit patch to cups os x. just my 2 cent here. I read nothing telling that so far. cups is a complex sub-systems and apple has the main author working for .
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Apple is not an "opensource" company, they used it to popularize os X 10.0. that's all.
Apple has no religion against or for open/libre source, and it shows again.
"we loved opensource", yeah, it gives them tens of yeaaaars of works.
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marcosmalo said 4:07AM on 7-13-2007
Bullshit, Michel. GPL v3 is a trainwreck. It's not good for creators or users. It's overreaching on the part of the FSF to satisfy some sort of personal or religious vendetta of Pope RMS. GPL v2, which covers Linux, is the superior license. It overs people a quid pro quo. To take advantage of the freedoms of the GPL v2, the distributor/contributor must give those same freedoms to the next guy. GPL v3 perverts this equation, adding on all sorts of gotchas and special cases, and worst of all, attempts to be a harware license. Maybe the FSF needs to change their name to the FHF?
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Marcos El Malo said 4:15AM on 7-13-2007
# 2 John Laur
I think you nailed the head right on the hammer. The FSF is making very aggressive noises about going after Apple. They're also putting a lot of pressure on the Linux developers to move to GPL v3 (to little avail; Linus and the other top contributors/maintainers are having none of it).
Whether or not we argue that Apple is a hardware company or a software company, it cannot be denied that they make the bulk of their profits from hardware. The GPL v3 is a frontal assault on hardware makers, an attempt by the FSF to take control of everyone's hardware (to "protect" us), and thus an attempt to control Apple's hardware designs.
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Toni said 4:25AM on 7-13-2007
"Nilay Patel from Engadget adds: Apple isn't affected by the license terms of CUPS, since they own it. A license only affects licensees, not owners. Apple could fork CUPS and close the source tomorrow and no one could do anything about it, although I'm certain the terms of the sale included a promise that Apple would keep it GPL'd for a certain period of time. The exception appears to be geared to printer manufacturers so they can write drivers and not have to open their code -- which is interesting, since the GPL already provides a mechanism for this sort of distribution, called the "mere aggregation" clause.. "
Well.., under the right circumstances they could. But that wouldn't close currently published code, neither will prevent opensource community to develop another opesource fork based on it.
However, closing the forked version is also in question and depend (among others) on how much GPL contributed code from other authors CUPS contains. It is not simply question of ownership, but also the question of inherited licenses.
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james said 10:32AM on 7-13-2007
so i have some questions because i don't know a lot about these things.
1) can people take the code in the state it was in *before* it was bought and still play with it and distribute it? can there still be a project around the code starting from when it was under public license that evolves independently?
2) is there any risk that by apple owning this project that it's quality may actually suffer? i was always of the understanding that public licenses allowed for stronger development.
just curious. or am i bluring the lines too much between public license and open source?
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milosh said 1:53PM on 7-13-2007
Nilay Patel (a lawyer) adds...
Fortunately this is false: the owner cannot change the license of a software without the consent of its authors, unless the author has given this right to Apple. That is the copyright belongs to the one who wrote it. In US, it can be transferred to his employer (which for the authors of cups is not apple), but in France, the author keeps his right on his work.
If the authors have agreed for the double license, Apple can however fork cups into a closed version. The OSX exception which references a single platform is quite peculiar and it seems to me it is clearly incompatible with any GPL version...
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Slaptijack said 1:32PM on 7-20-2007
Since many Linux distributions use CUPS, how are they affected by this?
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