Apple’s Dormant CUPS
Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997 and the first public betas appeared in 1999. The original design of CUPS used the Line Printer Daemon protocol (LPD), but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was initially called “The Common UNIX Printing System”. This name was shortened to just “CUPS” beginning with CUPS 1.4 due to legal concerns with the UNIX trademark. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for most Linux distributions. In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2. In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.
Tim Anderson (2020):
The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019.
[…]
Asked at the time about the future of CUPS, he said: “CUPS is still owned and maintained by Apple. There are two other engineers still in the printing team that are responsible for CUPS development, and it will continue to have new bug fix releases (at least) for the foreseeable future.”
[…]
Till Kamppeter, leader of the Linux Foundation’s OpenPrinting effort and organizer of the printing micro-conference at Linux Plumbers, commented on Larabel’s observations, pointing to this post where he says: “Due to dormant upstream development, we have discussed to creating a temporary fork on OpenPrinting [of CUPS] for bug fixes and distribution patches, and Michael Sweet has done it now.”
The “dormant” bit refers to Apple’s CUPS project; and OpenPrinting’s CUPS fork is here. Kamppeter added that “in case that Apple does finally cease CUPS development, I will continue the project together with Michael Sweet on OpenPrinting. CUPS will still be needed in Linux.”
LinuxReviews (Slashdot, Hacker News):
Apple’s CUPS git repository at Microsoft GitHub become a ghost-town after Mr Sweet’s departure. There is a single commit bumping the version and fixing minor issues in 2020 and that’s it, that’s all that happened in the CUPS git repository this year. That’s a stark contrast to the activity there previous years[…]
It looks like nothing has happened with Apple’s code since a security fix in 2022, and the repo comment makes it sound like Apple is intentionally leaving its support stuck at an old version:
Apple CUPS is the version of CUPS that is shipped with macOS and iOS. For the current version of CUPS that is used on other operating systems, see https://openprinting.github.io/cups for details.
Previously:
- macOS 15.1
- HP Printer Driver Certificate Revoked
- Scripting Languages to Be Removed
- Mojave’s rsync From the Days of Tiger
- An Aging Collection of Unix Tools
- CUPS and Usability
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What’s lacking about Apple’s CUPS? Does it actually need updates in the age of AirPrint? Genuine question. The only thing I ever print to is my HP 452dw and it has always worked well from my Macs and my iOS devices.
@Rob I don’t know. If you look at the OpenPrinting repo, it seems to be getting continual bug and security fixes, many committed by Sweet himself. It seems unlikely to me that none of these are relevant or will be relevant to Apple. I don’t think a key part of the OS should sit there unmaintained, even if it seems to be working right now.
Apple will just let CUPS bitrot until it's too much effort to port over bug and security fixes, and then they'll remove it from the OS to declare a greener/paperless revolution. Users can still install 3rd party CUPS if they need to print, but Apple just doesn't have the staff or money to keep maintaining these UNIX tools for dinosaur paper users who should go compile the latest and greatest anyway. Yes, I'm still sore about the removal of Python and the gradual lobotomy of the UNIX side.
