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.

The CUPS Common UNIX Printing System up to now had been developed under the GPLv2 license while now Apple will be switching it to the Apache 2.0 software license.

The company posted to CUPS.org, "Apple is excited to announce that starting with CUPS 2.3 we will be providing CUPS under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0."

CUPS 2.3 is the next update for this Linux/macOS/BSD printing system. Apache 2.0 is obviously more permissive and BSD-like than the GPL and doesn't come too much as a surprise that Apple is making this move for their benefit with macOS.