this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Ehhh.... Apple took over CUPS development.
Michael Sweet of Easy Software Products developed CUPS in the late 90s. Apple hired Michel Sweet about a decade later and bought the source code.
After he left apple (another 10 years or so later), OpenPrinting forked it and Michael Sweet continued working on it there.
But no, Apple did not develop CUPS. I don't blame you for thinking they did though.
Edit: Forgot to note.
Source: I'm fucking old now and was using Linux before CUPS existed. Holy shit was it great once it went IPP from LPD.
Edit 2: Sorry because Apple does this a lot and this one still annoys me - Safari was built on KHTML, aka KDE and Konqueror. So anyone trying to say that Apple made WebKit all in house would also be wrong.
Apple likes to do that. Take stuff and then pretend they made it. Especially from open source projects.
Companies do that. Apple more quiet, Microsoft more abusive.
Edit: while writing this, i thought of multiple cases, where they invited some project dev to a talk for a inhouse job and then ghosted them until they were done cloning it. Winget/Appget (which is dead now) one example.
Yup. MS has been more blatant and ruthless, where Apple has quietly taken (or even just taken credit for) the works of others over the years. For Apple you've got the ipod click wheel (creative), the original GUI (PARC), slide to unlock (noenode).... Apple, much like MS, has been doing this sort of stuff from the start.
Thanks for the history!
I'm glad my decades old grudges against apple could be informative!
Apple is such a frustrating company lol. In Seattle we still don't have tap-to-pay for public transit with iPhones because Apple keeps so much control over what the NFC transceiver on their devices can be used for. You can tap-to-pay with Android devices. So I'm stuck still using my physical card.