On 22 February 2016 at 15:59, Hari Pravin <[email protected]> wrote: > We are considering Poppler Utils "pdftocairo" and "pdftoppm" to be used as > part of a SAAS solution that is under development. As the licensing of our > solution is not compatible with GPL, I am not sure if Poppler can be used > along with it without acquiring a commercial license.
I'm not a lawyer, but for a SAAS solution I don't think the GPL matters. It mostly concerns itself with distribution, and you're not distributing anything, you're selling a service. The AGPL would block this, but plain GPL is fine. If you want to sell a tarball of all your code that includes a GPL binary, I think this is the FAQ entry you need: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem So it's OK as long as the GPL part and the non-GPL parts are obviously separate. For example, you could have a module in your office365 clone which offered previews of PDF documents in a web browser (and that module could use pdftocairo behind the scenes). But if all your SAAS solution did was PDF previews in a web browser, your thing would clearly be a derived work, a simple layer over pdftocairo, and you would find all your code was GPL'd too. You'd need to comply with the other term of the GPL as well, so you'd need to include the sources to pdftocairo and so on. John _______________________________________________ poppler mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/poppler
