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The creator of CUPS was employed by Apple, to work on CUPS. He left, and doesn't work on CUPS anymore. It's not some cloak-and-dagger thing.

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The creator of CUPS does still work on CUPS. He had to fork the repo in order to keep working on CUPS after Apple didn't accept any patches and added only a single commit to CUPS in the course of an entire year.

his fork: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups

Cloak and dagger? no

Terrible stewardship of an open-source project? yes

Surprising, given Apple's history? not at all

Apple moved to the Internet Printing Protocol (which they brand as AirPrint), just as Google did (after they killed Google Cloud Print) and Microsoft (branded as Universal Print).

The last thing Apple did with CUPS is add functionality to allow legacy printers that don't natively support IPP to function as an IPP printer.

>Products using the Internet Printing Protocol include CUPS (which is part of Apple macOS and many BSD and Linux distributions and is the reference implementation for most versions of IPP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol

Going forward, the Printer Working Group is in charge of IPP, and the creator of CUPS now works for them.

https://www.pwg.org/ipp/

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