On 07/28/2011 06:32 AM, Brent L. Bates wrote:

>       One point of clarification.  CUPS was NOT developed by Apple, they bought

> it.  I used to talk to the guy who actually created it many YEARS ago as free

> software.  He then commercialized it some, then eventually sold it off.  I

> guess Apple owns the rights to it now.



My understanding is that you are correct, and that CUPS evolved from 

earlier lp driver databases -- implementationally and somewhat 

conceptually different from predecessors, but following a path that had 

been forged.



As a further aside, I for one do not care who is funding an open systems 

source-available project -- CUPS nominally is a .org , not a .com or 

.biz .  It is obvious from the responses that Fermilab does not have the 

dedicated staffing to provide such a capability for hard drive parameter 

data -- does CERN?  Does any other more-or-less public entity anywhere 

in the world?  Would a for-profit entity step up to the plate, as Apple 

did with CUPS or Sun (now Oracle) did with OpenOffice (Sun bought 

StarOffice that became OpenOffice)?



Yasha Karant