Legendary OpenPrinting architect looking for new role • The Register

Till Kamppeter, the lead developer of the OpenPrinting subsystem for Linux, has been laid off by Canonical after 19 years.

Kamppeter shared the news on his Mastodon feed, which – ironically – is hosted on the Ubuntu Social instance.

The OpenPrinting project develops and packages a complete subsystem that makes connecting to and setting up printers even easier than it is on Windows. The project is also backed by the Linux Foundation, but until now, project lead Kamppeter had been on Canonical’s payroll since 2006 – just after the release of Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake,” the first ever LTS version.

Before moving to Canonical, Kamppeter worked at Linux Mandrake, where he was hired in 2000 to move the distro’s printing system to the new CUPS. As he put it:

As its history page describes, OpenPrinting is the modern successor to CUPS, which was acquired by Apple some years ago. It still includes a modern version of CUPS, forked in 2020, as The Register reported at the time, which is now up to release 2.4.12. Although CUPS is still a core part of OpenPrinting, for more recent printers, it’s being replaced by the more modern, much more capable, and largely driverless IPP Everywhere, which was co-designed by Michael Sweet, CUPS’ original author. The OpenPrinting project integrates CUPS (for older printers) with IPP (for newer ones), plus the plumbing to connect it to the underlying OS. This includes Windows’ Modern Print Platform.

Kamppeter told us:

So what happened?

Canonical told The Register it was unable to comment on the departure.

It seems to us that Kamppeter has been an accidental victim of an internal evaluation system that happens to favor people who work on things that directly benefit Ubuntu, rather than the wider Linux world. This is one of the perils of trying to automate the assessment of an employee’s value.

Kamppeter is a well-known and popular figure in the Linux world, not only in Europe but also in Brazil and India. He’s organized development work via the Google Summer of Code program in both countries, and he is also still a Linux Foundation fellow.

He told us that he received many emails expressing shock and dismay from former colleagues – which as it happens is an experience this vulture also had when leaving a different prominent Linux vendor. He’s set his LinkedIn profile to show “Open to Work.”

We wish him luck… and we also hope that this proves to be an educational experience about business process automation, for his former employer and for others too. ®