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Cups Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up
- spacemanmatt 6y agohttps://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-printers-1819572893 https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-...
- 0x10c0fe11ce 6y agoThe Onion is spot on, again. Cook is turning Apple into HP. So long, thanks for all the fish.
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago(2011)
- andylynch 6y agoThe joke is good but they did just that with the LaserWriter 35 years ago. It was revolutionary almost as much as the Macintosh (and had more computing power!). I remember my uncle setting up a new business at the time and getting a bank loan for a Mac and the printer. It cost about the same as a new car and was worth the money.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI think the point is they gave away a software asset connected to a dying market, not a developing one. This colors my view of their generosity.
- triyambakam 6y agoMaybe a community fork can thrive? This (potentially) personally affects my home print setup.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoWho in their right mind is going to dedicate their free time to writing printer drivers in 2020? Forking solves the problem of a poor maintainer holding up things, it doesn't just spawn interested developers out of nowhere.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoYou would think the printer manufacturers would have an interest in keeping this well maintained. Sadly I can't see it happening.
- anaganisk 6y agoPrinters or open-source, choose one.
- bgorman 6y agoSay what you want about HP, but they have open source Linux drivers for all of their printers https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing Everything works perfectly.
- mkesper 6y agoBeware, many new multifunction printers require proprietary plugins for scanning (and even some pure printers require it for working at all). https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/binary_plugin.html https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/bina...
- Xylakant 6y agoOwning a few HP devices and using Linux, I’d be careful using “perfectly” in that context. It’s better than others, but for example scanning tends to fail sometimes when libraries get updated etc. There’s a few more nitpicks around paper selection, dual side printing etc.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoIts pretty interesting how much core open source technology is maintained by a single developer and just vanishes when they leave/get bored.
- teraflop 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- andreareina 6y ago> xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
- cosmotic 6y agoPrinting on windows and macos has been pretty stagnant for years. Windows printing is still a pretty awful experience; the print queue gets jammed and windows is really slow to unclog. The worst part is finding and updating drivers. MacOS printing does a lot better with drivers and clogged queues but it too could still use some work. It's too bad there doesn't seem to be much industry support for a common, open driver system. PS was a good try but seems Adobe licenses killed that one. Similar with PCL and HP. There was a glimmer of hope with XPS years ago but that quickly fizzled.
- ashtonkem 6y agoEven AirPrint seems to fail with pretty distressing regularity for me.
- djxfade 6y agoIsn't AirPrint just CUPS over Bonjour?
- GeekyBear 6y agoAirPrint is a just a brand name applied to the Internet Printing Protocol, although it uses Bonjour for discovery. Kind of like Microsoft's brand new "Universal Print" is a brand name applied to the Internet Printing Protocol, although it uses Active Directory for discovery. Google, recently announced they were killing CloudPrint to support IPP instead.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoHasn't Apple been a major adopter of/contributor to CUPS?
- saagarjha 6y agoApple owns the code to CUPS. They hired Sweet, the author, and got the code as well.
- askvictor 6y agoWhat development needs to be done, other than bugfixes and security once they're found? Drivers should be able to (and do) exist outside the CUPS codebase; what ever happened to code being finished?
- nine_k 6y agoAs soon as the bug report queue has dried up, then, well, yes. Has CUPS reached the TeX nirvana?
- zaarn 6y agoWell, for one CUPS could be modernized. Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, setting up a printer is non-trivial for the average user and often enough requires digging into CUPS internals. It's configured either via an ancient and partially broken printer applet (and with broken I mean I have a reproducible crash when trying to view my printer queue before the current print has begun printing on that printer, reported somewhere in 2015 but never fixed) or via the web interface, which is broken in different, exciting ways. Sometimes printing breaks, my browser for example cannot print, it always just prints an error message (which is not logged, it's only printed, there is no way to tell something went wrong by looking at CUPS), so all prints have to be done by another utility. The code for CUPS isn't finished, it's a mess. The printing experience on Linux could best be described as "piss poor" if you're being nice about it. The best thing about CUPS one could say is "most of the time it'll have you printer do something that resembles printing your document".
- blaser-waffle 6y agoSeconded. I'm on Fedora and it wasn't a bad experience, I had to go to the Brother website and download the drivers and run some binary blob thing as root -- not crazy about that -- but it eventually it worked. OTOH, my Win10 work laptop found it on my wifi, connected, and was good to go in about 5 minutes. Didn't have to download, extract, and run some random vendor tarball, just said 'find" and it found.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoA commenter on the post points out that the author seems to be writing a replacement for CUPS https://www.msweet.org/pappl/ https://www.msweet.org/pappl/
- ahofmann 6y agoI'm not surprised, who else would be more interested in CUPS than someone working towards a better solution?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aneutron 6y agoThat's no replacement for CUPS. Far from it, it builds upon CUPS. From the page you linked: > PAPPL requires a POSIX-compliant host operating system such as Linux®, macOS®, QNX®, or VxWorks®. It also requires the following support libraries: > CUPS 2.2 or later for the CUPS libraries (libcups2/libcupsimage2)
- GeekyBear 6y agoIt adapts CUPS to fully support the latest version of the Internet Printing Protocol, IPP Everywhere. >PAPPL fully implements the IPP Everywhere™ specification and passes the IPP Everywhere™ Printer Self-Certification Manual tests. https://www.msweet.org/pappl/ https://www.msweet.org/pappl/
- pkaye 6y agoLooks like the main developer is working on something to replace it? https://www.msweet.org/pappl/ https://www.msweet.org/pappl/
- executesorder66 6y agoBut CUPS is one dependencies of pappl. Or is that going to be just a temporary thing?
- robertlagrant 6y agoLiterally the first line of the website makes it clear: > PAPPL is a simple C-based framework/library for developing CUPS Printer Applications, which are the recommended replacement for printer drivers
- morpheuskafka 6y agoKind of makes sense, printing is not exactly a killer feature for macOS anymore--more like a tolerated necessity of office users--and any improvements would likely be needed in the proprietary UI layer, not the underlying CUPS codebase.
- toyg 6y agoah yes, a core traditional Apple constituency being photographers, clearly good printing support is unnecessary. /s
- phonon 6y agoCheck the fork. https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1212363-cups-printing-system-open-source-development-has-seemingly-dried-up?p=1212519#post1212519 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron...
- akerro 6y agoWhat are differences between this and original?
- pbreit 6y agoIt's being worked on.
- andrewnicolalde 6y agoBy the original maintainer of CUPS too it seems.
- easton 6y agoI wonder if there’s any chance Apple upstreams the changes back into OS X.
- glutamate 6y agoWhy can't printers just run a Web server where I upload a PDF?
- bipson 6y agoSome (professional ones, e.g. Canon) do - additionally to offering other interfaces. But let me tell you, it is terrible not being able to print from your system dialogue. Then there is IPP and LPD/LPR. But those are either limited and sometimes the results not ideal (LPD), or again rely on a driver on your system to access the features of your printer (IPP) e.g. double sided printing, toner levels, print quality, etc.
- jstimpfle 6y agoBecause that's just another shitty implementation of a print service. There is a reason why print services are implemented on the Desktop OS and not on the printer (well I'm sure many printers do have a shitty implementation): Because there's few Desktop OSes but so many printers. You want to split the work and implement each thing where it is most efficient. Things a print spooler should do: - Queue print jobs, be able to watch progress, cancel them. - Manage permissions, maybe implement quota or similar. - Offer desktop integration in print dialogues: N-up, shrink, duplex, and other common postprocessing features. With a print dialogue, a lot of manual labor of creating temporary files and editing them with a particular application is saved.
- bluGill 6y agoDon't forget manage several printers. At home I only have one so this doesn't matter. At work I need to choose between one of several printers in the building. In a school lab: students want to print and have whichever of the 3 identical printers right next to each other print it, depending on which printer isn't busy with some other student's work.
- magicalhippo 6y agoWhy can't printers just have a USB standard ala USB mass storage, or USB HID, so I can just plug it in and it works for basic printing?
- iElectric2 6y agoThe new green deal!
- bee_rider 6y agoWe already have decent tablets, and we're absolutely going to have decent e-ink tablets (as laggardly as the progress there has been) before we manage to get printer drivers figured out.
- bipson 6y agoThe paperless society is a dream. Still nothing beats printing a document, scribble on it and giving it to someone or putting it a stash on your desk - not even having a device being capable of doing those things digitally without hick-ups. The two most important issues are: - This device (possibly) stacks all of these papers you would have printed out - so they are lost in a sheer endless space of all these various documents and even worse versions thereof. And then if you start sending these versions to others, e.g. expecting feedback, all hell breaks loose. - There is still something about sitting with a stack of papers in your hand/on your desk - no digital device involved. Most people can't focus on a digital version the same way they do on a physical paper. I'm a huge fan of the ReMarkable (2), but simply put every (even awesome) attempt so far has failed. Then add to that all the hick-ups that are simply never to leave. Software incompatibilities, sharing tools not working with all devices, walled-gardens, ... the problems are still endless and just get worse with every tool you add. How are you going to print exams for students? Forms for residents to fill out? We are not going to demand of every citizen to fill out everything online at all times, are we? That would leave the most vulnerable even more stranded than they are now.
- bee_rider 6y agoMy main application for paper is writing notes -- I haven't found a good digital replacement yet, but I'm open to digital paper. Having one repository of all notes would be really helpful, I think, as long as it was properly indexed. But I agree that there are areas where paper will never be beat. Plus, I've used a wacom tablet and, while I was impressed that they managed to somewhat mimic the feeling of writing with a pen, it isn't the feeling of writing with a great pen. And nowhere near the feeling of a nice mechanical pencil. There's room for improvement.
- frankzander 6y ago
- usr1106 6y agoI have never owned a printer. When my daughter got old enough to ask why don't we have a printer I said: Whenever you want to print, go to the library and I'll give you the money for printing, there is no limit. For some reason the whole family's printing budget has never exceeded 5 Euros per year in the last 20 years. Distance to the library cannot be the reason, it is 1 minute from school. I worked in a paperless company for many years, where the printer was locked to print only contracts and similar documents. While printing is overrated, of course the library printer needs a driver, too. And preferably open source in true Stallman spirit (I'm not a big Stallman fan, but wasn't it so that the whole Free Software movement started because of a closed source printer driver?). But as a domain of little general importance, I am not surprised about the lack of a thriving community.
- pantulis 6y agoMy last printer was from 2 decades ago and was only used to print documents. I kind of miss reading source code written by others on dot-matrix long sheets, you can reason around existing code in a different way than navigating through a text editor or IDE. Still not indispensable, though.
- rudasn 6y agoHaha I thought I was the only one. When I started being interested in coding, I remember printing the code of some mIRC scripts, and later on printing, html/css files. Everything I would learn was because it was in the source of some other program,and finding something I never seen before was a thrill. Fun times!
- usr1106 6y agoYes, being able to scribble on a source code listing has its advantages in the case of truly obfuscated code. I have done it once in the last 15 years or so, only 2 years ago. Imagine the faces in the office when I worked with that source code listing in front of me :)
- zmix 6y agoAbsolutely! No better way to consume other's code than going through it on a printout! This was the very reason I looked out for a modern dot-matrix printer, last year, only to find, that they have gotten pretty expensive (at least when compared to the InkJets and Lasers and in color, you also want more than 80 columns, etc.). Also, what I did not find was a printer utility, that would print as many pages as still readable onto the paper, with a special emphasis on source code (hilite, etc.) I did not purchase, however, since it is not so often, that I have to go through somebody else's full source-code.
- jacquesm 6y agoIt just works. Please don't fix it.
- billpg 6y agoIt's 2020 and printer manufacturers still haven't settled on a standard printer interface. I remember once buying a mouse and having to install a driver for it. Then one day, the mouse manufacturers all agreed to use a single interface. Now I can plug in any mouse and it just works without even having to download a driver. Why can't I buy a printer, plug it in and the OS sees a device with a standard print-a-page interface?
- andylynch 6y agoThey have plenty of standards! - appsociey/jet direct, postscript, pdf , pcl, pjl , ipp, AirPrint, etc etc. Although AirPrint is pretty much just this.
- pabs3 6y agoI wonder if there are any printers with open source firmware?
- m0zg 6y agoCUPS is amazing. My old HP printer (no longer supported in Windows) works in Linux, but it also works from Windows, and even from iOS devices via AirPrint. This is something that's impossible in any other printing system that I know of. Whoever took CUPS this far has my eternal gratitude.
- jbirer 6y agoI dislike this whole "we must keep adding features and doing things" culture. Some things like CUPS or the DWM window manager have reached a point where there is nothing more to do because it does everything it is supposed to do.
- pantalaimon 6y agoBut there are still new printers coming to the market.
- Igalze 6y agoMakes sense, printers are going the way of trebuchets and polaroid cameras.
- pojntfx 6y agoHonestly I'm happy to print at my Uni's library at this point. I just send a PDF and that's it - it's much cheaper than a personal printer anyways.
- Theodores 6y agoI would like to see a printer that is indistinguishable from a box of A4 paper (2500 sheets). In the lid of this imaginary printing solution is the printing gubbins with the ink needed for reasonable coverage on the included paper, plus the circuitry needed for wifi/bluetooth/Chrome web printing. When the box is done it should email you to arrange for it to be replaced, with recycling part of the deal. Its replacement also arrives just in the cardboard box such as what you get with 2500 sheets of paper, so no huge polystyrene packing and no plastic in the printer housing, that being cardboard. In this design double sided is not going to happen or any other paper sizes apart from A4. It no longer competes in aspects of versatility, nobody cares about its printer driver, no ink cartridges have to be bought, the internals are only good for 2500 sheets and it just works.
- upofadown 6y agoNever been a big CUPS fan as it tends to be a pain to set up. These days good old lpr is more than enough for the amount of printing required. The printer can keep all its fancy features and not bother me with them.
- monster_group 6y agoI don't like printing but printing is indispensable (at least in US). There are many official documents you have to print, sign, scan and send. Just yesterday I had to fill out a mail order so that my office can send WFH equipment to my residence. For those who are recommending running to the nearby print-shop, it doesn't matter how close the store is, nothing beats the convenience of having a printer-scanner right next to my desk especially when it's raining or sub zero outside. These days kids are doing school from home, so I scan their art-work and upload (turns out better than taking a picture). My ten year old Brother laser printer works well with CUPS and if it were to die I'll buy a laser printer-scanner in a heartbeat. It makes life so easy having a printer-scanner at home.
- jashephe 6y agoIt’s always surprising to me to see an article like this that’s vaguely about a person, without seemingly any attempts to reach that person for comment. I’ve filed issued on a few of Michael’s repositories since he left Apple, and he was extremely responsive. I’d be surprised if he ignored Phoronix if they had actually reached out to him.
- coldpie 6y agoPhoronix is... not a great journalistic outlet.
- pure_simplicity 6y agothe person in question is not allowed to talk
- smoyer 6y agoThe first sentence was so horribly written, I skipped reading the article. As usual, reading the comments here was a better use of my time.
- princekolt 6y agoI hate the pressure people put on open-source developers of working for free, forever, on projects that they started. It is one of the main reasons I stopped making my side-projects open-source. All you get is a deluge of requests and complaints, some of them barely coherent, and almost zero people actually contributing back. Maybe they don't care about it anymore. Or maybe they do but don't have the time/motivation to work on it. Some people have lives. Do you want to see changes to this project? Then fork it.
- lscotte 6y agoOf course it has, now that Apple owns it. Open source is not consistent with Apple's culture.
- currysausage 6y ago“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. On December 20, 2019 Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS)
- VonGuard 6y agoThis is 100% because Apple decided to pick up the CUPS developer. I called him after he was hired to do a story about it and he acted like I was trying to kill him . "I CAN'T TALK TO YOU!!! you're a reporter!!" Imagine that feeling being imparted like 2 days after yer hired. Also imagine how hard they made it for him to keep contributing to CUPS. I only wanted to talk about CUPS, I didn't give two shits about the Apple news, only what it meant for CUPS going forward. They never let me even speak to Apple PR about it, let alone him.
- hitekker 6y agoYou're denigrating your primary source as a paranoid maniac on a public forum. While also misspelling, cursing, and complaining about people declining to talk to you, the reporter. Sounds like the CUPS developer and Apple dodged a bullet.
- pure_simplicity 6y agoSounds like he's only criticizing Apple's pressure tactics in hiring to me.
- cannabis_sam 6y agoPrinting should have been one of the millennium problems.. Like seriously, what company provides actually decent printers? None of them do, because they’re beholden to old paranoid execs who think that their shitty printer drivers or whatever somehow represents a competitive “asset”. It’s our economic system’s biggest flaw, that old clueless people can fuck up things beyond recognition (mostly for their younger, more informed and more educated colleagues) just because they have “seniority”, while being completely disconnected and ignorant of any relevant technologies past the fucking 1960s. (Then, of course, they vote in fascists, and complain about young people not voting, as if that excuses the fascists they voted into office.. disgusting..)
- freedomben 6y agoThe state of printers in general makes me so sad. The best printer I ever had was an HP in the late 90s. THE LATE 90S! Since then printers still jam all the time, have ridiculously expensive ink, don't work worth a damn (or at all) with my devices (lots of Linux and Android), and all sorts of other issues, and lately they seem to have some sort of DRM that when I took our printer offline for a few months, it never came back. The internals seem completely seized up. Some Googling has shown that many suspect it bricked itself because it couldn't reach the backend service it reports to. Speculation of course, but still absolutely enraging. I haven't printed more than a handful of pages in 10 years but my wife prints all the time. Part of me wishes she would either stop printing (not likely as she loves paper) or print enough to justify spending more money to escape the consumer printer space. In the mean time I wish I'd kept that HP from the 90s. Donating that and thinking things would only get better with time was a huge mistake. D-: