Apple Will No Longer Be Developing CUPS Under The GPL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Will No Longer Be Developing CUPS Under The GPL

One decade after Apple bought out CUPS as the de facto printing system for Unix-like operating systems, they are changing the code license...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=CUPS-Drops-GPL-For-Apache

[chilek]

What a pity - poor RMS

[Adarion]

Of course something like this had to happen sooner or later. Luckily it was quite later. Apache is still okay, but of course, they'll now have more opportunity to mess with the stuff. I also wonder how they can transfer the existing GPL code into something less freedom-enforcing.

[Guest]

Of course something like this had to happen sooner or later. Luckily it was quite later. Apache is still okay, but of course, they'll now have more opportunity to mess with the stuff. I also wonder how they can transfer the existing GPL code into something less freedom-enforcing.

I'm wondering too. How can they relicense code of other contributors? They would have to revert all the changes by other contributors, or get their approval. Doesn't it work like that?

[FastCode]

They must have signed a contract before contributing code.

[R41N3R]

what a pity

[SpyroRyder]

This being Apple I expect that in 5 years we'll have CUPS and CUPS for Mac. I wonder which printer makers will support.

[aht0]

.. something less freedom-enforcing.

If there ever was contradiction-in-terms..

[paulpach]

I don't want to get into the political aspect of whether copyleft is good or not.

By doing this, apple is lifting some restrictions to what you can do with CUPS, which I see as generous from their part.

[yoshi314]

i wonder if GPL even permits that.