People -- Call or write to Bruno's sales agent. If the cost/benefit of what iText offers doesn't make economic sense explain to him why it makes sense for Bruno's company to agree to different terms. For example, if the up-front amount is too high because you need the revenue from your software sales explain that. I can't say he'll agree but I've spoken to him and he is a long-term veteran in software sales, who understands the economics and cycles of software, and that neither Bruno nor anybody working with him wants to put you out of business.
Forking the old code-base is a bad idea for two reasons. The first, like Bruno explained, is technical complexity. The second is much worse though: think about the message it sends to open-source authors. I can't think of any worse precedent than a bunch of people who forked a GPL license (or whatever the former license was) because they were too cheap to pay reasonable licensing fees. Additionally the original code-base may have accidental IP "landmines" -- contributions that weren't fully licensed -- that could be a lot more expensive long-term if your product does well. That was a problem with Linux early on, though many don't remember. Linus's team (and Red Hat and others), like Bruno, cleaned up the code. There were still legal challenges that cost a fortune but IBM, Novell, and others (thanks Google!) bore the brunt of the financial and logistical cost to blast them away; they're unlikely to extend that favor, which literally cost tens of millions of dollars, to people who refuse to pay reasonable licensing fees on iText. A third reason that needs explaining, more mushy but still legitimate, is Bruno himself. He's incredibly modest and soft spoken but has a young child and is working three jobs. I don't know how old many of the people writing are but there's a certain amount of fairness and respect to him that's being overlooked. As we get older and develop lives we should be paid for our work; able to live off it. I personally think Bruno should consider avoiding the headaches and just selling the whole code-base, then working for, Adobe or another large software company. Any of the major software vendors -- especially Adobe, MS, Apple, and probably Google, IBM, and others -- would happily have him and give him support, allow him to work a schedule that's more reasonable, and financial security. But he doesn't do that because of his devotion to open-source. Bruno and his team have worked hard and turned out a great product. Talk to his sales agent and listen to what he has to say. If the fees will never work for your product you may want to ask them why: you stand to get some good advice on software fees (hint: sometimes higher fees actually increase sales, which is counter-intuitive but well documented). Finally, look at Adobe's fee structure for client and server-side and embedded PDF generation technology. Michael. On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Bruno Lowagie <[email protected]> wrote: >> -------- Original-Nachricht -------- >>> Datum: Fri, 7 May 2010 14:19:41 +0200 >>> Von: TvT <[email protected]> >>> An: Post all your questions about iText here >>> <[email protected]> >>> Betreff: Re: [iText-questions] What action is requred in terms of License >> >>> Just read the whole thread and it sounded like the internal discussion we >>> had in our company as well. > > As this isn't a technical discussion, I have asked sales to take a look > at the thread. I think some points need to be clarified as I'm reading > things that are taken out of their context. > > On a personal note: when I read about people who say "let's start a > fork", I feel the urge to give the fatherly advice not to make the same > mistake I made by spending day and night, without taking any holiday > whatsoever, working for free for over ten years for people who don't > realize what it involves to provide good software. > > Unfortunately, that fatherly advice could be misinterpreted. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > iText-questions mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions > > Buy the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ > Check the site with examples before you ask questions: > http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ > You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/ > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
