Anonymous wrote:
For what it's worth Bruno, I have always felt that your responses are on the tolerant, considerate and communicative side. I think people on the list should also consider the great extra pressure you are under from the deadlines on the book you are writing; a book which will be of great benefit to all the participants and observers of this list.
Thanks, I appreciate this. And it's not only the book that's causing the pressure. There are some big companies interested in iText, but... Well, I don't know if I'm right but this is how I see it: After 9/11 the industry the F/OS business boomed. Major companies hesitated to do long term investments (for instance buying software licenses for five years or more). So they discovered F/OS and thought it was great. But then they had second thoughts. This is their logic: "if we can use a product for free, so can our competitors. New competitors can arise and with free software, the threshold to develop a new competing product gets lower." So what we see happening over the last few years, is that new F/OS Licenses are 'invented' by companies. Not all these licenses are compatible with each other. I think they are trying to get a grip on F/OS to make it 'semi-propriety' again. Now I get mails from company lawyers on this topic more and more regularly. They start off very friendly, but then suddenly they want you to sign something. Why??? They have the MPL, but this doesn't seem sufficient for them. When reading those mails, I always get the feeling that they are reading me my Miranda rights: "Everything you say can and will be hold against you..." I really hate that. I made iText free, because I thought: if there's no money involved, then I won't be harassed by lawyers and stuff. That worked for a while. For instance: when MacroMedia shipped iText with ColdFusion, they hired Leonard Rosenthol. I didn't see any MacroMedia or PdfSages money, but I was lucky nobody bugged me with legal questions. The most absurd mail I ever received came from TI (but fortunately that's a really long time ago). They wanted me to fax them a signed statement that if somebody sued them for a problem in their software using iText. Can you imagine that? iText is free and it will always remain free, but the iText developers pay a price to keep it free. That's a part of the picture iText users usually don't see. br, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions
