Apple has a lot of good stuff out there doesn't it? Aren't llvm and cups theirs more or less?
They gave up on CUPS, which was left in limbo for way too long. Now it’s been forked, but I don’t know how successful that fork is.
They took over LLVM by hiring Chris Lattner. It was still a significant investment and they keep pouring resources into it for a long while before it got really widespread adoption. And yes, that project is still going.
Tbf if you look at all the printer drivers out there. You know why they dropped it. PPD is also not a good standard. I mean it would not be too bad, but what printer developers do to make their shitty printers work… (like adding binary command filters and stuff, binary tray mgmt extensions…) xerox for one example ships really strange drivers. Most of the time I use their windows ppd and strip the binary stuff.
CUPS is still the only print system macOS has. Apple never dropped it in the sense of ceasing to use it! "They dropped it" only in the sense of more or less ceasing to maintain it-- there was only one commit in the course of about a year, and no patches accepted from outside contributors at that time-- until it eventually had to be forked.
The name stands for Common Unix Printing System, and Apple CUPS ceased to meaningfully be that after its author left the company. But Apple still uses CUPS in their operating systems!
cups seems to be properly maintained now https://github.com/openprinting/cups
Yes, that’s the fork I mentioned. The last version of Apple CUPS seems to be 3 years old https://www.cups.org/ .
Apple is heavily involved in llvm, but so are a several other companies. Most prominently Google, which contributes a huge amount, and much of testing infrastructure. But also Sony and SiFive and others as well.
It’s all very corporate, but also widely distributed and widely owned.