Chris Hedemark on Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:42:10 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] CUPS (was Re: Without OS X)


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On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 09:24 PM, William H. Magill wrote:

According to cups.org, the only vendors supporting CUPS are:
	Apple
	Caldera
	Conectiva
	Mandrake Linux
	MIZI
	Lycoris
	Peanut
	RedHat
	Suse

That's actually quite a list, and a misuse of the word "only" in an attempt to diminish the gravity of this broad support.


(The claim of "support" by SuSE is interesting. My distribution (7.0 Alpha) comes up with lpd support, not CUPS, by default.)

Of course. The distros are transitioning into it. Red Hat has quietly included CUPS in the last few releases and has been easing users into it.


There are implementations (but not vendor supported) for:
	AIX,

A more conservative platform than Linux can afford to be.

Debian,

Possibly the last distro to pick up the 2.4 kernel, and one of the longest development cycles of any OS.


FreeBSD

I lack the context to comment.

HP-UX

HP-UX is also a conservative UNIX with a long development cycle. Back when version 11 came out, how many people even heard of CUPS?


IRIX

Ditto.

	NetBSD
	OpenBSD

If NetBSD takes licensing as seriously as OpenBSD (and I don't know the former community as well as I do the latter), CUPS is license incompatible. Even if it is technically superior, the GPL holds it back from broader acceptance. This may also be a part of why some of the big UNIX vendors aren't more enthused.


Solaris

Again, a conservative UNIX with a long development cycle. Also, getting major changes like this in is a big deal.


Tru64 Unix

Ditto.

TurboLinux

I have no context with this community to comment on their reasons for or against using it. Honestly, I've never met any who claimed to prefer TurboLinux anyway. I kind of lump that in with oddball distros like Kondara (in the north american market anyway).


So, while there are implementations "available" for all of the mainstream Unix distributions, no vendor yet supports them (i.e. includes CUPS in their distribution and provides support for it).

The biggest UNIX vendor does.

And, Apple is the only *BSD player which supports it.

They don't have a lot of legacy to support for one, and they aren't religious about Free Software vs. Free Software (i.e. GNU vs. BSD)


Of course, what is not listed in this list is the fact that Microsoft and Novel have had IPP implementations (but apparently not CUPS) for their various OS for several years.

Microsoft and Novell are not UNIX.

CUPS is the UNIX implementation of a number of printing protocols, including IPP. Microsoft and Novell each have their own respective implementations.

CUPS does have a GUI, which, since it is apparently little known about, could prove to be (is?) a security issue. The CUPS daemon listens on port 631 -- the IPP port -- and responds to simple html commands.

And by default can only be accessed by browsers at localhost.

Chris Hedemark
PGP/GnuPG Public Key at http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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