Hi Stephen,

Yes it is a bad situation but I don’t think there are a set of ‘CUPS’ developers versus one person trying to keep the software going. Apple stopped supporting the product and msweet is working for himself now. lprint seems to be a ‘make a best out of a bad situation’.

I don’t know what any other alternatives there are as more and more printers seem to be wanting you to send your prints to some central web server they own and then will talk with your printer and print the task. Or they say they support the IPP but really its an app on your machine which just takes it and makes it something proprietary and trying to talk ipp to the printer fails.

You don't need any central web server or special app to be able to print via the current printer standards, which are driverless (IPP Everywhere/Airprint/Google Cloud Print). In case your device is on your LAN or USB, you don't even install the device permanently - CUPS is able to pick up Avahi messages about a device being in LAN or on localhost (in case of USB printers after you install ipp-usb) and set up a temp queue for you when you are about to print - the queue is removed after successful printing.

Printers outside of your LAN need to be installed permanently right now via printer configuration tools (CUPS web ui, gnome-control-center, lpadmin) or via cups-browsed. We plan to support such devices by printer profiles, so the queues won't installed permanently either.

Devices which currently depend on a deprecated functionality - printer drivers and raw queues - will need a printer application once the deprecated functionality is removed from CUPS. This application will advertise the device on localhost via MDNS protocol and will communicate with CUPS via IPP, both public well-known protocols. The only place where the data can turn into proprietary is filtering, but it's the same with printer drivers.

-- 
Zdenek Dohnal
Software Engineer
Red Hat Czech - Brno TPB-C