Op 8/03/2011 16:45, Josselin Mouette schreef:
Hi, and thanks for the effort of providing the complete information. Le lundi 07 mars 2011 à 09:31 +0000, Andrew Ross a écrit :The software itself is the current version of iText, which is licensed under the AGPL with the following additional term: "In accordance with Section 7(b) of the GNU Affero General Public License, you must retain the producer line in every PDF that is created or manipulated using iText."I’m not sure how to interpret this restriction. If it is in accordance to Section 7b, it means you cannot remove from iText the code that produces this line in PDF files. You are still free to remove the line in the generated PDF file if you want. If the intent is to restrict modifications that can be made on generated PDF files themselves, the license is clearly non-free (and considered a “further restriction” in the AGPL).
Copy/paste from a previous answer.If company B is using iText, Company B is bound by the license. This doesn't mean the producer line can't be changed; there are different options to add extra data: - They can add data to the existing producer line ("created by product A; modified by product B") - They can use an other metadata field (Application in Document Properties) to add whatever they want.
Read ISO-32000-1 to find out more about metadata in PDF.If company C is using PDFs produced by company B, it doesn't enter in the AGPL, but has the right to know that Company B uses iText. During post-processing operations, the producer line may change or even disappear.
Now that I think of it: company B can be identical to company C. Maybe it's better to talk about "product X using iText" and "product Y processing PDFs produced by iText".