CUPS Purchased by Apple

An interesting story came out recently that Apple has 'purchased' CUPS.org. Since CUPS is an Open Source project, this may seem slightly surprising.

It appears that Apple has hired the primary developer and he has reassigned the copyright for the code to Apple.

From the commentary I've read, it appears that this is a purely defensive move by Apple to prohibit CUPS from moving to the GPLv3 license (it is GPLv2 now). Apple uses CUPS in OS X to configure print sharing. There are some significant changes in GPLv3 regarding treatment of patents, and as I commented in my previous post, this is causing headaches for several companies. I have not dug into all the implications of GPLv3 yet, but this is a space to watch.