Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 22:48:38 (+0100), Brian wrote:
> On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 17:00:02 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 03:49:23PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by
> > > Apple Inc. for macOS® and other UNIX®-like operating systems."
> > > 
> > > which is stretching the truth IMHO, given the normal meaning of "for",
> > > "and", and "other", written in that order. Calling it "Common UNIX
> > > Printing System" would blow that out of the water.
> > 
> > Their use of "developed by" is rather jaw-dropping as well.  Perhaps
> > they mean it in the sense of "maintained by", but I think most people
> 
> No, they mean "developed by...".
> 
> > would read it as "created by" which is blatantly untrue.
> 
> Most people have an understanding of language (which you appear to lack)
> and would read it as "developed by...".

I think that was rude and uncalled for.

The clever thing about the web page is the careful omission of a comma
after system, so that the sentence gets read as

C is the S   that is   developed by A

rather than

C is the S,   which was   developed by A.

My observation is that most computer software websites credit the
original authors/creators/developers in a place easily found by
casual visitors. I haven't found any mention of Sweet outside the
blog, and only a mere two occurrences there.

Going back to your point about the logo, it's very odd that although
"CUPS, the CUPS logo, and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc.",
http://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/appletmlist.html
makes no mention of CUPS or its logo, and I would appreciate anyone
pointing out an example on the CUPS website. Its absence may be
because Apple don't like putting it on the web as it has "UNIX"
prominently displayed. The only legible occurrence I can see on my
screen is the big one on the CUPS homepage. The logo that sits on
every page appears to be deliberately fuzzy.

As for the meaning of "develop", you seem to have been influenced by
that fatuous sentence "Brexit means Brexit"! In the normal world,
one of the meanings of "develop" is "create". For example,

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/develop

 transitive verb

 2 b : to create or produce especially by deliberate effort over time
       <develop new ways of doing business> <develop software>

Is this an unusual meaning in the context of computer software?
Let's look at some great software creations and how they are reported:

http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-whatTeX.html
"Knuth developed the first version of TeX in 1978 to deal with ..."

https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-inducted-into-the-2013-internet-hall-of-fame
"Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of GNU ..."

http://www.few.vu.nl/en/news-events/news-archive/2016/jan-mrt/30th-anniversary-andrew-tanenbaums-minix.aspx
"Emeritus professor Andrew Tanenbaum developed this operating system while ..."

http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-05-1998/swol-05-perl.html
"Larry Wall developed Perl in 1987 to simplify administrative reporting ..."

http://www.gocertify.com/articles/python-is-the-holy-grail-so-to-speak-of-programming-languages.html
"Ultimately Rossum developed a language and interpreter that immediately ..."

http://memim.com/lame.html
"... Mike Cheng developed a patch for an example implementation of an MP3 encoder"

Cheers,
David.