“In the wake of Apple’s purchase of CUPS, there is a simple
lesson to take away–if you are a developer committed to open
source and you wish for your contributions to always remain open,
do not reassign copyright to an external party.“As the new holder of copyright to all CUPS code, Apple is able
to re-license and add non-open functionality into CUPS if it so
wishes. This situation is not unheard of within the open source
world as it is similar to what Trolltech could do with QT or MySQL
AB with MySQL. In fact, the Red Hat acquisition of JBoss made Red
Hat the sole copyright holder of JBoss for the exact same reasons
that Apple is now the sole copyright holder of CUPS…”
Related Story:
Apple
Now Owns CUPS(Jul 13, 2007)