Re: Retiring lpr and lpd

On Sat, Feb 21, 2026 at 9:57 AM Dag-Erling Smørgrav <[email protected]> wrote:
> Tomek CEDRO <[email protected]> writes:
> > Uh, like cups, maybe not a problem for users but definitely a problem
> > for vendors.
>
> CUPS is not GPL.

True CUPS is Apache 2.0 [1] :-) TA probably meant GPL components
required to work in most cases (i.e. ghostscript, foomatic-filters)?

Anyways I use cups myself since it showed up, because it has those
filters that allow using non-PS/PCL / USB / network printers, provides
common interface to gui applications, etc etc, which I could not make
working otherwise with a simple LP* long time ago, and nowadays is
kinda standard :-)

Also cups does not obsolete old printers [2], in fact you can take out
ppd from win95 drivers pack and make your favorite Xerox network
printer work out of the box with all features available :-)

[1] https://www.cups.org/doc/license.html
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/printers/microsoft-stops-distrubitng-legacy-v3-and-v4-printer-drivers

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info