cups

You might think that such an important and long-standing feature as printing would undoubtedly be backed up by a large company. This was true until 2019, when it was backed by Apple. Currently, however, CUPS and all related projects are supported by volunteers, including myself. Apple abandoned CUPS years ago, and recently have archived the repo on github: https://github.com/apple/cups All the current development runs in OpenPrinting github: https://github.com/OpenPrinting, and mostly focused on newer projects, such as CUPS v3, PAPPL, Printer Applications. Recent versions of CUPS v2 are still used in Chrome OS and Chromebooks though (apart from all Linuxes).

For context the guy who made Gutenprint (and CUPS) deprecated the PPD driver API in CUPS and it doesn’t support them anymore. https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5271 So I assume thats why there’s no maintainers, and probably will never be.

Apple should be more open about their removals. It isn't clear how this affects their CUPS implementation or PostScript printers https://github.com/apple/cups

CUPS is under the Apache License 2.0 , so they can just use it, if they wanted: https://github.com/apple/cups/blob/master/LICENSE They won't of course.

... or unless Apple shipped a buggy version of CUPS: https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5747

Very interesting. That certainly sounds like PreserveJobFiles was set to 'yes' or a stupidly high number. And it sounds like, as you say, a subsequent OS update changed it to a sensible setting. FYI the default value is 24 hours so it might be interesting for you to print something now, see if the job file (starting with d, I guess this is sort for 'document') is preserved after the print job completes, and then check a couple of days later to see if it's been removed by cups. [subsequent edit] Maybe you ran into https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5747, "You really need to use a current release of CUPS. I suspect this is due to a known bug that was fixed a long time ago" - maybe that bug shipped with an older version of macOS and that explains what people are seeing.

I noticed that there was an update to Big Sur — the newest OS that this machine can run — which I had missed, so I installed it, and the files went away! I also noticed that there has been issues, like https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5538, related to spool file clean-up. (The fix to that one leaves some decidedly fishy-looking parentheses, but they were fixed in a later commit.)

After he left, all his cups commits to Apple's public CUPS repo stopped[1] and his work continued in the OpenPrinting fork of CUPS[2]. Interestingly though, it seems he resumed committing to the Apple repo in March. I'm glad CUPS on macOS isn't going to be left behind, but I'm curious what happened there. 1. https://github.com/apple/cups/graphs/contributors 2. https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/graphs/contributors

CUPS was almost entirely[1] made by Michael R Sweet who left Apple close to a year ago[2] and now works for his own company. Completely understandable to move the upstream repo away from Apple, I don't think there's much else to it. He's been very active in the fork AFAICT. His Sponsors page: https://github.com/sponsors/michaelrsweet [1] https://github.com/apple/cups/graphs/contributors [2] https://www.msweet.org/blog/2019-12-20-left-apple.html

Well I guess there's Foundationdb [1] and cups [2] but those were acquisitions. [1] https://github.com/apple/foundationdb [2] https://github.com/apple/cups

Indeed, the old license [1] was not pure GPLv2, but a variant of GPLv2 with additional exceptions for Apple operating systems, allowing others to develop proprietary printer drivers for Apple operating systems. It even covered the use of the example code for this purpose without the need to release the source code of the resulting driver based on that. [1] https://github.com/apple/cups/blob/branch-2.2/LICENSE.txt

It looks like Apple pay for the majority of work too, assuming @michaelrsweet is paid by Apple to work on cups. https://github.com/apple/cups/graphs/contributors

Here's the commit: https://github.com/apple/cups/commit/e310189747c161ac6e737ee...