

Eric Raymond on CUPS usability [2006] - loumf
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

======
zdw
CUPS main developer was hired by Apple in 2007, and the source code was
purchased from him, with open source releases ongoing.

That said, there's not much of an improvement to the device configuration,
even in OS X, since this came out, if you have to configure the printer
manually.

The one big thing that makes OS X printing so easy is that it tends to
autodiscover directly connected USB printers, and most recent networked
printers support Bonjour which in most cases "just works".

------
chrisbolt
Entry is from 2006.

Why isn't there a generic printer driver, like USB HID or USB Mass Storage?

~~~
wmf
Winprinters are supposed to be as cheap as possible; adding a layer of
abstraction would cost money. OTOH if you buy a printer with PostScript,
Ethernet, and Bonjour it will likely just work with a generic driver.

It's not clear that ESR's problems had anything to do with drivers, though.

------
ryandvm
I bet there's a premium market for software and hardware that "just works"...

Nah.

