Alan wrote:
I would add that the earlier denigration of the Mailing List was also quite galling: to my mind this is the heart and soul of iText - an activity to which many people (Paulo and Bruno especially) patiently and carefully give a lot of time for FREE.
Thanks for your support! There are lots of misconceptions about Free and Open Source Software. From time to time I see people compare products in a way that is completely wrong, for instance: they compare JasperReports with iText. Even after making their study, they don't realize that JasperReports is a reporting tool that uses iText as its PDF engine. A PDF engine is NOT the same as a reporting tool. It's as if you would compare a car with it's motor. That's just the technical comparison. People also read stuff about Open Source and money. I am often amazed by the amount of money that is put into Open Source. Recently I have read this article: http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&issue=20060323 At the bottom you can read that JasperReports pulled in $8 million last summer from investors. If you get such an amount of money to produce an F/OSS product, it is only normal that people have high expectations. I want to stress that iText is a completely different story. Paulo and I get a donation in the form of an Amazon Gift Certificate once in a while. We're talking about amounts between 25 and 100 English pounds here. I am not complaining. I like it this way! I just want to show the clear difference between the service one can expect from a major OS company compared to the iText community. Just compare the price/quality ratio ;-) The article also talks about open source firms being bought up by major companies. This is impossible with iText, as there is no company behind iText. It's really just a community and you can't buy a community (that's also in the article). I have played with the idea to start my own company, but I don't see how this would improve the product. Writing a book on the other hand is much more interesting (well, not financially, but you know what I mean). Of course, if IBM or HP or any other company decides to give me a check that's 5 times what I earn in a year, I would consider quitting my job to spend all my time on iText, but that's just not going to happen, because companies that can afford to do so will always ask for something in return and that would compromize the word 'free' in 'iText, a free Java-PDF library'. Sorry for this non-technical noise on this list. I just wanted to share some thoughts to clarify on the position of iText in the OS world. The OS model is very diverse; iText has its place in this model, but it can't be compared with products such as jBoss or companies like Apache. But I was very flattered to see that iText was rated the 'overall best component on the market for its intended purpose' in a study that seems to be made for the Australian government. See pages 71 and 72 of this document: http://www.softmetaware.com/ea-and-oss.2.0.pdf br, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions
