by , 12:45 PM EDT, July 12th, 2007

Apple Inc. isn't just a user of the CUPS, or Common UNIX Printing System, now the company is the owner, too. Michael Sweet, creator of CUPS, revealed on Wednesday that Apple purchased the printing system source code and brought him onboard as an employee in February 2007.

Apple uses CUPS for part of the printing system in Mac OS X, and with the purchase of the source code, that isn't likely to change.

CUPS was developed by Mr. Sweet under the GPL2/LGPL2 license, commonly used for free and open source software. He claims that Apple will continue to offer CUPS through the same licensing scheme, which means that developers should be able to use the CUPS system just as they always have.

Mr. Sweet also said that he will continue to develop and support CUPS as an Apple employee.