Apple Will No Longer Be Developing CUPS Under The GPL

[Michael_S]

Your attitude is exactly why Linux will never be a competition to Windows and MacOS on the desktop, willingness to tolerate bugs and continuously persuading yourself that it keeps getting better while in reality basic functionality often doesnt work, missing functionality, bugs etc. Geeks might tolerate that, but others dont have time and energy for that. I used to tolerate all that, but not any more, I am opening my own business and I am not risking things breaking in the middle of a business trip, subpar quality of some applications and crappy battery life. Any software setback would cost me time, energy and money, that is unacceptable and therefore I am buying a Macbook Pro, it has great battery life and everything just works without jumping through hoops to make some peripherals or software work as intended. Its proprietary? Yes and I dont give a fuck as long as it serves my purposes as intended and makes me money. In a better world Linux might do that job for me reliably, but it cant and I am not pretending it can because I know from experience it cant.

For the price of that Macbook Pro you could get an awesome laptop with Linux and a backpack full of spare batteries. So that problem is solved.

And again, if you're running an Ubuntu LTS release in my experience nothing breaks. What are you doing with your desktops and laptops? What breaks are you experiencing?

Admittedly, I am a power user. My employer was bought by a much larger company and I had to trade in my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS laptop for a Windows 10 Professional laptop. It's been a nightmare:

- I used to run multiple concurrent builds (our builds take a long time). I can't do that, I can only have one account. If I want multiple simultaneous account locally I have to ask for Windows Server on my damn laptop.
- Git commands that took 0.2 seconds on ext4 on my old SSD take 3.5 seconds on NTFS on my new one.
- "sudo apt-get install vim" is a hundred times faster than opening a website, downloading an installer, clicking it, granting Microsoft User Account Control permission, choosing an install location, etc...
- Software updates user to be "sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y ; sudo apt-get autoremove -y" - I set it on a cron job, it never failed me. Now every once in a while a critical update disrupts my work for 45 minutes.
- If I am crazy enough to want a file manager or terminal console with tabs, I have to look for a third party one! The default OS vendor doesn't offer it, in two thousand and freaking seventeen.

I actually like PowerShell. To my astonishment, I think Microsoft got more right than wrong with it and I'm glad it's now open source. But aside from that one little bright spot, my job satisfaction got taken out behind the shed and slapped with some blocks of wood.

Tell me again which OS sucks?

[starshipeleven]

They'll release CUPS under their current Open Source strategy as always. Anything custom to Apple's implementation will remain custom to their implementation. It makes zero sense for them to muck with the driver level support of the printers. It makes absolute sense higher level bits tied into AppKit and more will be now more easily implemented, on iOS and macOS for AirPrinting, etc.

Yeah, I suspect the same, they are just making their life easier to integrate CUPS with their proprietary user space stack, which is irrelevant for everyone else.

[Guest]

Thanks for the laugh.

As an apple fanboy you probably missed all of those Phoronix benchmarks? macOS as a desktop OS terribly suck at graphic performance. Not to mention its market share is niche. Linux nearly beat it. If you want some more laugh:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/comput...l-capitan-fix/

http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/14/troubleshooting-macos-high-sierra-problems/

Pathetic OS.

[pal666]

As soon as they got your copyright they can legally do anything with the code, even sue you if you keep using that code in your own closed source projects. whatever promises they make on top aren't binding in any way.

i already told you they don't make promises, they sign legally binding contract. go back to school

[pal666]

Why i am almost sure that soon Lennart will show us printerd....

i am sure you have no idea that printerd was shown us 6 years ago by not lennart

https://github.com/hughsie/printerd/commits/master/AUTHORS

[pal666]

Your attitude is exactly why Linux will never be a competition to Windows and MacOS on the desktop

you forgot to explain how that same attitude allowed linux to destroy windows and macos on smartphones

[tiwake]

Apple will likely do with it as they did the BSD kernel... which is not good.

I recently bought a wide format printer myself (canon pixma pro-10) and there was literally no way to print anything over the network. Bought a $43 two years of updates closed source license for TurboPrint (they use CUPS I believe) and the printer seems to function exceptionally well, with all the options I could ever want. http://www.turboprint.info/

[Luke_Wolf]

If Apple can change the license to Apache they already could do their own proprietary internal fork... so... baseless fear mongering guys. Apple is just changing to the license universally preferred by companies who actually do open source. You all know I don't like Apple but even I'm telling you to chill out.

That said, let's say they did... let's say they went full evil on this, and CUPS was permanently frozen to today for Linux, and no company ever provided drivers for it ever again.... how many of you people fear mongering would actually be effected by this? Were you really intending on investing in a new printer at this point (especially one not from HP)? Because maybe it's just me but it seems like outside of academic contexts that printing is dead for consumers... businesses it's still a thing of course, but consumers?

[oiaohm]

That said, let's say they did... let's say they went full evil on this, and CUPS was permanently frozen to today for Linux, and no company ever provided drivers for it ever again.... how many of you people fear mongering would actually be effected by this? Were you really intending on investing in a new printer at this point (especially one not from HP)? Because maybe it's just me but it seems like outside of academic contexts that printing is dead for consumers... businesses it's still a thing of course, but consumers?

Today not as big as problem as it use to be for new.

https://wiki.debian.org/DriverlessPrinting

We are starting to see more and more printers function with generic drivers. Now a generic driver for scanners in MFP would be great.

Where I am I still need to print out government forms for different things then submit them in paper form so you have a certified copy if anything goes wrong. Mostly black and white laser work. I would say consumer need would be linked to country a bit.

[Sonadow]

If Apple can change the license to Apache they already could do their own proprietary internal fork... so... baseless fear mongering guys. Apple is just changing to the license universally preferred by companies who actually do open source. You all know I don't like Apple but even I'm telling you to chill out.

That said, let's say they did... let's say they went full evil on this, and CUPS was permanently frozen to today for Linux, and no company ever provided drivers for it ever again.... how many of you people fear mongering would actually be effected by this? Were you really intending on investing in a new printer at this point (especially one not from HP)? Because maybe it's just me but it seems like outside of academic contexts that printing is dead for consumers... businesses it's still a thing of course, but consumers?

I've already had nothing but pain with CUPS, especially when dealing with printer manufacturers that provide PPDs which make calls to their proprietary drivers that interface with CUPS. I should not have to install an additional driver package just to use a PPD.

That said, I'm trying to move away from CUPS completely (gotta get used to the whole 'driverless cloud printing' fad, y'know?) for lesser pain. Thus my next printer will be one that works with Google Cloud Print. The idea of not having to mess around with drivers is just too good to pass up; connect printer to network, log in to Google, upload PDF to Google and printer starts spitting out copies automatically.