Am 16.02.2010 20:04, schrieb Brett Neumeier: > Yes, absolutely!! My question, in my previous email and in this one, > is: what is the text in the AGPL that causes it to operate in the way > that you assert that it does? > > Moreover, there are some more points to consider.
First, it seems that the license switch to AGPL (i.e. a "viral" license) was made very silent. I have used iText a lot over the last years and although I always tried to update to the latest version and often visited the iText website I did not notice the license change until I read this mailing list thread (note that this itself is accidentially, I just happened to be subscribed to the mailing list at the moment because I submitted a patch some weeks ago and never got around to unsubscribe after no one bothered to even answer my patch submission). I just downloaded iText-src-2.1.7.zip to verify it still is LGPL (since that's what we're using at the moment) and, guess what, it does not even contain a LICENSE.TXT or something at all! I also downloaded iText-src-5.0.1.zip and it does not contain any licensing information either. So all of this is very shady. Second, I had tried to contact the iText developers in the past about adding some functionality to iText and requested an offer. My experience was really disappointing. Although I emailed with some persons several times I never really got a quote. Infact, although I specifically requested it, I never got an actual email of Bruno Lowagie (who seems to be the "mastermind" of iText after all). So I'm not sure whether iText BVBA (or iText Software Corp. or whatever it's called now) will live up to their own new expectations of being a "commercial" software company. There is also no indication on the website about the price of the "commercial" license. With this license change, iText is putting itself in direct competition with e.g. PDFlib (=> www.pdflib.com), which can be had transparently for about $1,100 (server license) and has lots of additional features. Third, I don't know about the development process of iText, but did the iText developers accept any patches from any third party? If yes, have all third parties agreed to the license change? If not, on what grounds can the license change be performed? All in all, it seems to me that someone is in desperate need of money here but did not think about the consequences. Markus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ 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/
