Apple acquires CUPS source

[Shawn Erickson]

On 7/12/07, Jared Earle <jearle at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/12/07, Matt Johnston <pelorus at mac.com> wrote:
> > Gee, J-C, why do YOU think they bought it?
>
> If I had to guess, it'd be to Stallman-proof it. Damned viral GPL3 ...

That is possibly one an aspect of it... however CUPS is under GPLv2
ONLY so unless Mr. Sweet decided to relicense it under GPLv3 no one
else can fork it and bump it to GPLv3. Mr. Sweet is now working for
Apple so I doubt he would decide to jump to GPLv3 without some
feedback from Apple.

I think another one aspect of why... is simply because Mr. Sweet
started to work for Apple and often companies prefer that projects
someone works are owned by the company to avoid questions of ownership
of work done while working at Apple. So since he held full rights why
not try to get full rights.

Also I believe Apple has had a special license relationship for CUPS
with Mr. Sweet for a while now that didn't bind them by GPL when
deploying on Mac OS X, etc.

-Shawn