That requirement to buy a commercial license is a deal breaker for us. We ship our product and license it by the site. The requirement of the commercial license is by the computer that uses the tool. At the cost they want and 30,000+ sites, our software is sold for less than they want per computer.
I'm currently looking at a .NET tool that sells their tool by the application created, and that application can be distributed royalty free. So we are looking at a onetime cost around $500 to distribute a working product to all our customers. Thank you for the feedback. Tracy -----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 11:12 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Replacement for PDFTK: mcpdf To address more specifically the AGPL issue, "Buying a commercial license is mandatory as soon as you begin activities including distribution of iText software inside your product or deploying it on a network without disclosing the source code of your own applications under the AGPL license." I think that's pretty clear. My situation was such that the owners of the network where I deployed my app received a full copy of the source code used in their app and were free to license it as they chose. The products of their application, PDFs, were distributed by other means to the end-recipients, through a different app, and therefore the end recipients didn't have any claim to the software. IMHO of course and IANAL. I use pdftk (the tool that uses iText) as a command-line tool on my Linux workstations and servers because it's such a handy thing to use for merging, bursting and such. Next rev of my OS will no longer include pdftk because of those licensing issues, and I have to poke around for replacements. For my use, the bursting and merging, there are a couple of other tools, but when it comes time to replace the client's machine that does a LOT of data merging, I'm going to have to look for an entirely different toolchain, which will require some expense to re-tool our code. 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/[email protected] ** 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.
