Bruno,

Am 17.02.2010 10:25, schrieb Bruno Lowagie:
> You were asked to contact Andrew because I was at the film festival in
> Ghent at that time (October 6-17): I only went online to check my mail,
> giving priority to Andrew's mail. His answer was correct: I don't have
> the time to accept development assignments as long as the book isn't
> finished.
>    
Okay, thanks for the clarification, I understand that now. Anyway, I had 
to exchange emails with several emails but did not get a quote in the 
end. As I already wrote, I just ended up a bit frustrated and chose a 
workaround instead. I just think that if iText (as a company) now wants 
to make (more) money with iText they should act like any company, having 
one website (instead of two or three) and having a central place where 
one can ask for quotes, price lists etc. I accept those circumstances 
when dealing with free software project but not when dealing with a 
vendor who wants to be paid for their software.Don't worry, JasperSoft 
was contacted long before the license change.

> JasperSoft and other projects can get out of trouble by moving to the
> AGPL. If that's not an option, they are probably making money with their
> project, in which case they should have no problem buying a license ;-)
>    
Jasper Reports is LGPL at the moment. It might have a reason that Jasper 
Reports is not GPL at the moment. Do you think it is an option for them 
to move to AGPL or move to being completely closed source? Or are you 
saying they can buy a license which allows them to redistribute iText 
5.0.1 under the LGPL?

> The rule is present in the source code. You can't miss that obligation
> if you try to change that line. Moreover there are a number of secret
> fingerprints in each iText generated PDF that allow us to find out if
> iText was used or not.
>    
Please note I do not want to do something illegal here. But as a 
committer to several free software projects, including GPL projects like 
Audacity and OpenSync, I do know a bit about licenses. The (L)GPL allows 
any third party to receive the source code and change it as long as the 
resulting work will be put under the (L)GPL, too. The (L)GPL does not 
say, it allows "any third party to change the source code except for 
some specially marked places in the code which must never be changed". 
You can of course extend the (L)GPL with such a clause but then it's not 
(L)GPL anymore.

> It's also impossible to miss the AGPL license, because:
>    
I did miss the license change, then again, I would never have envisioned 
that the iText project even would consider such a change. This is a real 
bummer for us, we are really thinking about forking iText now. We also 
use Jasper Reports and if they change to AGPL, too, we have a real 
problem. Of course, I'm going to request an offer from iText Software 
Corp. about licensing just to have all data available for decision.


Markus


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