#51 Please clarify licensing terms and remove ambiguities and contradictions.

[Derek Foster]

I have been doing an evaluation of various PDF generation libraries on behalf of my company, to see if they could be useful to us for some simple PDF documents that we would like to generate from our product. Overall, litePDF looks quite nice, and seems like it would meet our needs.

However, I am confused about the licensing of litePDF. Depending on where I look, I seem to find claims that:

1: litePDF is completely open-source, LGPL licensed (except for the parts that are zlib licensed), and free to use according to these licenses, with no restrictions on commercial use or expectations that a commercial user should pay extra for a custom license,

or

2: litePDF has a trial version that is free to use but is limited: some APIs are not available, and it draws notices about itself on generated pages (watermarks) unless a user pays a fee to obtain a custom license key and remove these restrictions.

For instance, the text at the top of https://litepdf.sourceforge.io/download.html says:

"There is no extra SDK for trial and paid version of the litePDF, the only difference is an authorization key, which unlocks all API functions and makes litePDF stop drawing notices of it on the pages. See the License section for an information on licensing."

However, I see no other information about this "trial" versus "paid" distinction: For instance, the "Licensing" page does not discuss "trial" versus "paid" versions of litePDF, and only contains a verbatim (?) copy of the LGPL license, with no information about what restrictions may exist or what the terms are for licensing via anything other than the LGPL, or even who to contact. It does not even contain a copy of the zlib license that it says (at the top) covers examples and some shared code.

In my evaluation experiences with litePDF so far, I have not seen any watermarks or "drawn notices" on pages, nor have I noticed any APIs which did not work. (Also, I don't see how limited APIs and watermarks could even really be enforced, since if the source code is under the LGPL, any user could simply remove any technical limitations (e.g. watermarking code or API limitations), making them ineffective, provided the user abides by the other terms of the LGPL (e.g. redistributability). Such a user could even redistribute the modified library.)

This situation is confusing.

I would like to make some very minor use of this library in a commercial product (which is, for the most part, not remotely related to PDF files). If the licensing is truly open source and free, this is a very easy decision to make. (I would, of course, be happy to submit bugfixes, added features, etc. back to the original project.) On the other hand, if the features I need will require a paid license and/or royalty payments, then I will need to negotiate with management in my company over whether I can use the library (and how much using it is worth to us, and whether the cost justifies the benefit, etc.), and things will get much more tricky, and it becomes much harder to justify using this library versus other libraries that are free to use.

Please clarify the text on the https://litepdf.sourceforge.io/download.html page to make it clear if the API limitations and watermarking are still in effect (perhaps this used to be true but is no longer true now that the project is open source?), and please make it clear if there is still a requirement to obtain a separate license to achieve the full feature set of the software, and if so, which specific features are unavailable to those who have not obtained a separate license, and what the terms are for licensing those features.

(Also, it would be nice to have a direct link to this SourceForge repository from one of the pages linked from https://litepdf.sourceforge.io. I had to do some googling to find where I could see the source code, change history, etc. and/or file tickets like this one.)

Thanks for any clarifications!

[Derek Foster]

Note: It looks as though I accidentally filed this against "milestone 1.0", but I seem to be unable to change it.

[zyx]

Thanks for a bug report. The litePDF 1.x used to be closed source and had the limitations. Since the 2.x the library is fully Open Source. I missed the note in the download.html page, it should not be there (funny it's at the very top). I removed it and added a link to the project page there as well.

[Derek Foster]

Thank you very much for your quick attention to this, and also for creating such a great library! I look forward to using it and hopefully making some contributions myself eventually.