Am 17.02.2010 01:31, schrieb mister bean: > "iText PDF AGPL Java-PDF library" If you go to lowagie.com and click on > "iText Home Page," you see the same thing. For most users, having the AGPL > aspect highlighted and bold as the first line of text on the project's home > page is pretty clear. Nothing "hidden" or "shady" as you call it. It's all > been out in the open. > Changing the license from MPL/LGPL to AGPL is a big change for the user. It needs direct response from any project, be it open or closed source. For example no open source project which currently uses iText 2.1.7 will be able to use iText 5.0.0 without completely changing its licensing model. Even if the open source project is GPL it will not be compatible with AGPL now. Don't you think this deserves a prominent warning label on the website and in the distributed files? It's like selling a car with the gas and brake pedals swapped and blaming the user because he could have read the manual.
> 2) "There is no indication of the price of the license on the website." All > you need to do is send a request to [email protected]. That's the > commercial arm for iText. This too has been posted several times on the > mailing list. > There are at least three websites involved: www.itextsoftware.com -> does the "licensing" as I know now www.itextpdf.com -> which mostly seems to be about the book but you also can download the software there sourceforge.net -> where the downloads are hosted Additionally, some external developers are involved in developing additional features to iText - neither iTextSoftware Corp. nor iText BVBA do developer work, do they? For someone new to all of this who just wants to know what the thing costs this is at best unhelpful. > 3) " 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." iText competes with all PDF libraries, open source and > commercial. It offers advantages and benefits not found in the other > libraries. PDFlib is not free (except for evaluation, personal, and academic > use) and not open source. Feel free to choose PDFlib if it better suits your > purposes. > Until now we chose iText because it was under a reasonable free software license (i.e. LGPL), we had access to the source code and it was an actively developed project. Now, iText is just another commercial offering with a license which forbids its inclusion in most other free software projects. > 4) Lack of response from the developers: You and I exchanged emails on 14 > October 2009 about your project. I contacted Bruno on your behalf and > personally mailed you his reply. I then gave you a list of possibly > interested freelancers. Your last email was to thank me for this help. I am > not sure why you think that the developers of an OSS library are obliged to > accept your offers to pay them for development of features you want. But you > certainly cannot say that you did not receive any response. You did. I have > the emails. > Please see my answer to Bruno in the other thread. 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/
