Does anyone know of a fork of iText? [closed]

Answer 1

The old versions will still be there. Given that most of the development for Itext has been from Bruno and a couple of others who will be putting there stuff into the new version, is there any point? Who is going to develop the fork?

Answer 2

There are a number of problems with your request:

• The list of people who can maintain an iText fork is fairly short. I happen to be one of them. ;)
• The list of people who can maintain an iText fork and are willing to potentially thwart Bruno's efforts to finally make some money from iText is (was when this was initially written) zero. I am certainly not one of them.

So there are lots of folks floating around who would love some free (little 'f') code for their commercial app. They can use 2.1.7 and deal with any bugs, go it alone, share their source, or shell out some money.

(And yes, I realize the hypocrisy of maintaining an MPL fork while encouraging others to pony up some dough. I've tried to do that with my own company, but my efforts thus far have not born fruit.)

Answer 3

There seems to be some sense that wanting to use or continue with the LGPL version is a personal affront to Bruno.

How about the fact that folks adopted the library because it was LGPL in the first place? Now a change in the package names and licenses is supposed to be ok and we should just shut up and live with it. That's called bait and switch.

Bruno can do what he wishes and it's understandable that the man wants some money for his efforts. If that's the best way to monetize his work then he should do so. However, that doesn't make those who want to use the original LGPL version pariah and wanting to move forward with a fork of that licensed codebase isn't being nasty.

Answer 4

I discussed some practical issues with the iText AGPL license in my blog (which is linked from my SO profile). Why not just buy IText? It is certainly an option among many commercial PDF libraries out there, although they really need to standardize their pricing against the competition.

The truth is I never really used iText much in the past. It always either lacked certain features, or the API was much more difficult than other (non-free) alternatives to wrap your head around, especially for minimal PDF manipulation (rather than the level of PDF manipulation required to generate a report, for example).

At this point the only similarly licenced PDF library I know of is ICEPdf, which is under the MPL 1.1 license, but its business model is to have a more limited version and charge for more advanced features (such as more font support).