iText/iTextSharp for commercial purposes : not recommended?

Question

I'm not really good with licenses thats why I would like to ask here about iTextSharp and the option to use it for commercial stuff.

I would like to work on a software to create PDFs and upload the stuff on some DBs and to print them out. For now it should be free, but maybe one day it could become commercial. As I know iTextSharp is not LGLP it's AGPL, and AGPL is for commercial software not a good solution. Is that right? I cannot use iTextSharp (free) for commercial software?

As I know there is PDFSharp, I heard it's not that perfect as iText but it should be enough. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use older versions of iText under the license they were under at the time of release. Version 2.1.7 was the last released version which is dual-licensed under MPL and LGPL. To my knowledge, these are friendly to closed source software. You (or ideally a lawyer) will need to review the license terms to assess their suitability for your project.

The iText license was changed to AGPL with the 5.0 release. There were no released 3.x or 4.x versions; the version number was increased simply to bring it in line with iTextSharp.

As iText no longer makes the older binaries available, you would do well to get the code from a trusted source and compile it yourself, for security reasons.

There is actually a 4.2.0 version in the iText SVN repository which is still under the old license scheme. Note the commit message:

This is the final version of iText available as an MPL/LGPL library. This release is not jarred, nor officially released on the iText web site.

See: http://sourceforge.net/p/itext/code/HEAD/tree/tags/iText_4_2_0/ (link broken)

I don't know how equivalent this is, but here is the last commit in the official iText GitHub repository before the header license change (v4.2.0 is not tagged, but I'm guessing this is it): https://github.com/itext/itextpdf/tree/935969371a8b4e28bc8bb78d6b6c9d87ab2ca8f7

Answer 2

The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.

Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic

Answer 3

The matter is not about you making money or not while using iText. It's a matter of you using iText in a closed source product. You can make tons of money with your product while using iText for free under the AGPL, as long as you publish your own code under the AGPL too.

You can later change the license of your product and make it closed source, but you'll have to use part of the tons of money you made to buy yourself an iText commercial license.