Mike put out CUPS 1.1.1, which fixes the worst tempfile bugs, but doesn't get some of the others. It also probably still runs basically everyhing as root, and it appears that the certificate generator is seeded with at most 13 bits of randomness, or fewer on platforms with faster jiffies.

The printing summit mailing list just had a thread about convincing printer vendors to open up (already comma dammit). There are two schools of thought on whether CUPS's link-free raster interface helps or hinders the cause; I'm thinking hinder, since vendors now have a lame cop-out way to provide reasonably functional binary-only drivers. OTOH, cups-raster is not a radical improvement over pnm except to the extent that cups provides a pretty interface to the filter driver. In any case, the obvious solution is for me to get my act together and enter the data to make cupsomatic work with all the drivers out there.

As the thread went by, I got curious, and mined my website logfile. Of my visitors:

• Some 20% are probably looking to buy a printer (1500 people/week)
• 2/3 of these people look for a compatible color inkjet.
• I point all those people at Epson, totalling some 13,000 Epson referrals per quarter.

Then I found HP sales figures - ~10 million DeskJets per quarter. Canon and Lexmark are in the 3-6 million range. The "lots of Linux people buy printers" argument isn't going to hold water unless I can produce a plausible and interesting number for "lots". I'm baffled about where to find it...