Mark Storer wrote: > There are a couple mentions of iText using AGPL going forward hither and yon, > but nothing OVERT.
Yes, it has been mentioned a couple of times. > Bruno will want to make some official announcment, but he's rather busy > Actually Writing Code right now. The release is scheduled for December 6. But I still have some work on the book and the new site: http://itextpdf.com/ > The next major release of iText will undergo several Big Changes: > 1) The version number will jump (to 5.0?), and both java and c# versions will > henceforth share the same version. > This is both a Sanity Thing and an effort to reflect other significant changes. Correct. > 2) MPL/LGPL will be dropped in favor of AGPL. The last MPL/LGPL version of > the source is iText 4.20, here: > http://itext.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/itext/tags/iText_4_2_0/ Correct; this "big jump" was made because the latest version of iTextSharp was 4.1.6. From now on iText and iTextSharp have the same release number. > Yes, the existance of iTextSoftware.com > (and the effort to make some money on many years of hard work) influenced > this decision. Also the fact that some companies "demanded" that I solved issues for free during the year my son had Cancer. That was a hard confrontation with reality: everybody was making money with iText except the original creators. Furthermore there was also the F/OSS unfriendly attitude of the Belgian Government (who is taxing me to death). iText as an MPL/LGPL library had become an anachronism. Moving to the AGPL was the only way to survive (or die). > 3) All non-PDF code will be moved into separate projects. Correct, see for instance: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextrtf/ > 4) All the "trunk" stuff is currently being moved (as we speak, > see aforementioned "Actually Writing Code" comment) into a new package, "com.itextpdf.*". THIS WILL BREAK BINARY COMPATIBILITY WITH EXISTING CODE. Given the licensing change, this isn't such a bad thing. Previous users will need to make a Conscious Decision to switch versions, not just drop in a new JAR file. Correct. This avoids possible legal issues: companies using iText 5 and infringing the AGPL, can't say they "didn't know" the license had changed because they had to change com.lowagie into com.itextpdf. The same goes for people who infringe the IP by making a commercial fork: it's a deliberate choice, not something that happens accidentally. > 5) iText will be built using java 1.5. Expect 1.5-isms > (generics in particular) to creep their way into the source, > though I'm not aware of any major effort to update en mass. Java 5 is already "end of life", but I didn't want to jump from JDK 1.4 to Java 6; hence the choice for Java 5. I'm waiting to see how this move is accepted, and how many users still depend on JDK 1.4 before I do a massive update. best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net 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/
