According to a post on the CUPS.org website, Apple has acquired the source code and the author of the CUPS modular printing software.
In February of 2007, Apple Inc. acquired ownership the CUPS source code and hired me (Michael R Sweet), the creator of CUPS.
CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple.
CUPS which stands for Common Unix Printing System has been part of Mac OS X since 2002, the software code is used widely in the Linux and Unix computing worlds.
Computers running CUPS act as host machines that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer. The software is comprised of a print spooler and scheduler, a filter system that converts the print data to a format that the printer will understand, and a backend system that sends this data to the print device.
No financial details of the deal have been disclosed from either party.