pdf-stapler

Raman Gupta rocketraman at gmail.com
Thu Jan 14 18:38:58 UTC 2016


On 01/14/2016 01:27 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 14 January 2016 at 18:19, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 14 January 2016 at 13:58, Ted Roche <tedroche at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> This was discussed last year. I think the mcpdf utility also depends
>>> on iText, which has some licensing issues.
>>>
>>> Here is some of that discussion:
>>>
>>> https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/65261/pdftk-not-in-f21/
>>>
>>> I also have client applications that depend on pdftk. My solution was
>>> to switch them to Ubuntu.
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure that was the problem last time, there was also something
>> about libgcj being needed. I know this keeps going round in circles,
>> so apologies if I'm repeating old information, but I think this is
>> what killed it when rpmfusion tried,
>> http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-developers/2009-January/003671.html
>>
> 
> Current itext license in case mcpdf is actually a possibility. Would
> probably need someone from fedora legal to check it's acceptable as
> they've used some modifications, which may be allowed by the APL, but
> I know itext has a little history with making non-free modifications
> to free licenses:
> https://github.com/itext/itextpdf/blob/master/LICENSE.md
> 

No, I believe the ambiguous additional language at the end of that
page, requiring a commercial license in certain situations, is the
actual problem. Here is the relevant post from Redhat legal:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/legal/2011-June/001656.html

And since mcpdf uses itext, it will have the same issue. In any case,
mcpdf is, at least currently, woefully short of being a pdftk
replacement. And it doesn't seem the author or anyone else is working
to improve that situation -- the last commit that added functionality
is two years ago (https://github.com/m-click/mcpdf). There is an mcpdf
copr though (I haven't used it):

https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/thomasfedb/mcpdf/

Pdf-stapler at least provides the select/cat capability of pdftk,
which mcpdf does not.

Regards,
Raman



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