Michael Sweet (programmer)

Michael R. Sweet is a computer scientist known for being the primary developer of the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). He also developed flPhoto, HTMLDOC, and Mini-XML and was the original developer of the Gimp-Print software, now known as Gutenprint. Sweet contributes to other free software projects such as FLTK, Newsd, and Samba. He co-owned and ran Easy Software Products (ESP), a small company that specialized in Internet and printing technologies and went on to sell HTML publishing software.

Sweet graduated in Computer Science at the SUNY Institute of Technology in Utica-Rome. He then spent several years working for the Navy on real-time computer graphics. After releasing a freeware tool "topcl", in 1993 Sweet set up Easy Software Products (ESP) and developed the ESP Print software. He started work on the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) in 1997 and in 1999 released it under the GNU GPL license along with the commercially licensed ESP Print Pro.

Apple included CUPS in its Mac OS X operating system and in February 2007, they purchased the copyright to the CUPS source code which, unusually for an Open Source project, was largely owned by ESP. Apple also hired Sweet to continue the development of CUPS.

Sweet is the chair of the Printer Working Group (PWG), secretary of the (IPP) working group, a designated expert for IPP and the Printer management information base (MIB) for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and is active in printing standards development within the PWG. He has written several books including Serial Programming Guide for POSIX Operating Systems, OpenGL Superbible, and CUPS (Common Unix Printing System).

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