Most of the patches we applied have meanwhile been incorporated into the iText distribution. I don't know whether my predecessors shared them, or whether you or your development team fixed the issues of their own accord. Other patches incorporate later-version features of iText into a known and stable version of the library.
As for active F/OSS development, we have submitted patches to and/or work actively one such projects as Eclipse and Chiba. It is impossible for a smaller company such as ours to dedicate resources to every single piece of F/OSS source code that we use. As for the exact contents of our patches to iText and the matter of a Contributer License, as far as I know, the matter was never raised before; so I suggest you contact my employers. However, your announced moving to a more restrictive licensing model containing a 'Belgian restriction' will not ameliorate relations between you and the company I work for (neither will it with any other company you attack on insufficient F/OSS-like behaviour). Nor will it improve chances of us becoming contributers. As for the business model you mention: you follow a F/OSS business model; we don't. You choose to generate some kind of income (though I gather not for you personally) from those people or companies willing to buy a commercial license (either from their own free will, or after gentle prodding by you); we (that is, my employers) chose to follow a commercial business model, supporting a few F/OSS causes on the side if time and resources permit. As for the role that iText plays in our product: iText is incorporated in only one of the 400+ plugins that Scriptura consists of. I'm sure you can imagine that the hundreds of other plugins (some containing other F/OSS libraries, most with code written by our developers) take up so much time to maintain and extend with new functionality that contributing to F/OSS projects is not too high on the company's priority list. Note that contributing to, for example, Eclipse is also made easier by their having a publicly accessible Bugzilla and no need for the signing of a Contributer License. Regards, Bert Vingerhoets - Research & Development Inventive Designers NV Phone: +32 3 821 01 70 Fax: +32 3 821 01 71 Email: Bert_Vingerhoets at inventivegroup dot com http://www.inventivegroup.com/ -----Original Message----- From: Bruno Lowagie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday 16 July 2009 12:24 To: Post all your questions about iText here Subject: Re: [iText-questions] (no subject) 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/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -- Inventive Designers' Email Disclaimer: http://www.inventivedesigners.com/email-disclaimer -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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/
