Bert Vingerhoets wrote: > Finally, a mailing list is not the proper place to discuss this kind of > subject.
Why not? It's about doing business with F/OSS. > I'm sure that this can be settled amicably through some other channel, > like in the way we discussed our problems with iTexts font processing speed > at JavaPolis two years ago; where, IIRC, you were not as opposed to Inventive Group's use > of iText as you are now. Maybe the champagne helped to sweeten the bitter > pill at that time :-) I'm not opposing Inventive Group's use of iText. I just don't understand how their use fits in a F/OSS business model ;-) Also: times were different back then. I didn't know I would be considered "self employed" by the Belgian Government. There was no iText company. My kids were healthy and life was "easy". Meanwhile F/OSS has matured, and companies are expecting more from F/OSS. I've experienced that process "first hand"; at a time my family was struck by Cancer. That wasn't easy; as a matter of fact, it still isn't. The only thing that was simple, was to distinguish the people/companies who supported me from the people/companies who didn't. The same goes for friends: as soon as I told people my son had Cancer, some people dropped me without any explanation. I can only assume that they couldn't face being confronted up close with Cancer. In any case, I lost all contact with them. Other people did exactly the opposite: they offered help and supported me while struggling through a very difficult episode. See for instance: http://www.slideshare.net/blowagie/a-hippopotamus-for-christmas That was personal. Now it's business. There are companies still actively supporting iText. For instance: Leonard Rosenthol is constantly giving valuable advice. Not only on the list, but also off-list; for instance: if we're not sure how to interpret some specific parts of the PDF specification. That's really appreciated. I experience this as "a good symbiosis" with Adobe. There are also companies explicitly choosing the MPL, saying things like "DigiStamp's (sample) source code is licensed such that using it in a commercial application is not allowed, hence I didn't even take a look at it; I prefer MPL-licensed code, even if that means an extra day's work to figure out how it works." You probably ship the extra source code with your product, but we don't have access to that code (we'd have to buy the product), nor can we use it in iText (unless your company agrees to sign the Contributor License Agreement; maybe they are willing to do so, but it was never offered). Both types of companies have their place in the IT business, but whereas the former are beneficial for the further development of the product, I don't see how the latter fits into a F/OSS business model. Maybe that's because I'm very new at "doing business". Thanks to the people at iText Software Corp. (who have many years of experience in the field) I'm learning new things every day. Please contact them if you think my reaction is based on a misunderstanding. best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
