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IText / iTextSharp for commercial use: not recommended?

I am not very good at licensing, so I would like to ask here about iTextSharp and the possibility of using it for commercial use.

I would like to work on software to create PDF files and upload them to some databases and print them. At the moment, it should be free, but maybe one day it will become commercial. Since I know that iTextSharp is not LGLP, it is AGPL, and AGPL for commercial software is not a good solution. It is right? Can't I use iTextSharp (free) for commercial software?

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

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It's not that you make money or not while using iText. This is a matter of using iText in a closed source product. You can make tons of money with your product when using iText for free under AGPL, while you publish your own code under AGPL too.

You can later change the license of your product and make it a closed source, but you will have to use part of the ton of money that you made to buy yourself a commercial iText license.

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You can use older versions of iText under the license they were on at the time of release. Version 2.1.7 was the last released version, which has a dual license under MPL and LGPL. As far as I know, they are friendly with closed source software. You (or, ideally, a lawyer) will need to familiarize yourself with the terms of the license in order to assess their suitability for your project.

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

Since iText no longer makes old old files available, you should get the code from a reliable source and compile it yourself for security reasons.

The iText SVN repository has version 4.2.0, which is still in the old license scheme. Pay attention to the commit message:

This is the final version of iText, available as an MPL / LGPL library. This release has not been corrupted or formally published on the iText website.

See: http://sourceforge.net/p/itext/code/HEAD/tree/tags/iText_4_2_0/

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

But if you somehow release the modified version to the public, the GPL will require you to make the modified source code available to users of the program under the GPL.

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

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

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