IANAL and, in addition, I Am Not A Lawyer, so please regard anything I say as bad advice and seek council before making any decisions.
Disclaimer aside, I have to say that the PDF world is a mess of licenses. Adobe donated PDF to the world, and the Postscript programming language that it is based on. After that, everything gets muddy. GhostScript[1], the most common PDF interpreter, has a long license that seems to indicate that it can't be bundled with commercial products [2] without a commercial license. Everything under the sun is dependent on GhostScript, and most people just seem to look the other way. Some products I use finish the installation with something like "It appears you do not have a Postscript interpreter installed. Would you like to download one now?" to avoid the "bundled with" designation by simply aiding the end-user in a separate installation. I have no idea if this kind of play-acting skirts the issues or not. Wikipedia [3] has a fairly thorough article on this, with lots and lots of footnotes. For many of my clients and their specific needs and situations, I've recommended commercial products like CutePDF Pro, Nuance's PowerPDF, and PDF995's high-end products (work with Terminal Service's configurations). (Disclaimer 2: Nuance is a former client.) [1] http://www.ghostscript.com/ [2] http://www.artifex.com/page/licensing-information.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Tracy Pearson <[email protected]> wrote: > Ted Roche wrote on 2014-12-10: >> I've recommended PDFTK a couple of times here, and use it daily to run my >> business, as well as a solution for a couple of my client's. PDFTK is a >> command-line utility to manipulate PDF files, merging, collating, > stamping >> or data-merging PDFs with a zillion options. >> >> It is getting long-in-the-tooth and has caused some upgrading issues with >> me over the past couple of years, as the versions I have are bound to > older >> libraries and an upgrade path is unclear. There's also some licensing >> issues that means it's no longer included with Fedora/RedHat, my > preferred >> Linux builds. I have on occasion rebuilt it from source and it is not a >> pretty thing; it uses a toolchain of Java build tools I'm not familiar >> with, and had difficulty tweaking to work. >> >> I saw a thread on a Fedora Users forum this morning that suggested a >> drop-in command-line replacement called mcpdf: >> https://github.com/m-click/mcpdf >> >> "Mcpdf is a drop-in replacement for PDFtk. It fixes PDFtk's unicode > issues >> when filling in PDF forms, and is essentially a command line interface > for >> the iText PDF library with a PDFtk compatible syntax." >> >> Haven't tried it yet, but wanted to alert folks to the possibility. >> >> If someone here does work with it, I'd appreciate hearing how it works > for >> you. > > Ted, > > Hello Ted, > > I had a need to go back and look for what you use to manipulate PDF's and > found this message. > > In researching this tool. It is based on iText which uses the Affero General > Public License. http://itextpdf.com/agpl > This is an unknown area for me, and might require one to purchase a > commercial license of iText to be able to use this tool in a product you > distribute without sharing the source of it. > > Ugh, is all I have to say about the mud of the wording of this license. > > "The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all > the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable > work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to > control those activities." > > > YMMV, > Tracy > > > > Tracy Pearson > PowerChurch Software > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/cacw6n4sacbpacyf0zxap+8yivkeq1rdvatdkpt3hvh4ju3h...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
