Reading PDFs in LC (again)

[Richard Gaskin]

Graham Samuel wrote:

> I was scared of ImageMagick both because of the Windows-specific technical warnings on the download site and because of the license terms.
>
> The good news is that people on this list have persuaded me that I should not be scared. There is still some question over the license terms, since the one commercial supplier of the main underlying component, GhostScript (Artifex), insists that:
>
>> If your application (including its source code) is not licensed to the public under the GNU GPL, you are not authorized to ship GPL Ghostscript or GPL MuPDF with your application under the terms of the GNU GPL if any one of the following is true:
>>
>> your application contains a copy of some or all of GPL Ghostscript or MuPDF;
>> your application is derived from, is based on, or constitutes a revision of some or all of GPL Ghostscript or MuPDF;
>> your application includes one or more functions that use some or all of GPL Ghostscript or MuPDF.
>> These criteria apply to your application as a whole. Even if only one section of your application satisfies one of these criteria, you are not authorized to ship GPL Ghostscript or GPL MuPDF with your application unless your application, including all of its source code, is licensed to the public under the GNU GPL.
>>
>> If your application (including its source code) is NOT licensed to the public under the GNU GPL and you intend to distribute Ghostscript or MuPDF to a third party for use with and usable by your application, you MUST first obtain a commercial license from Artifex.
>
> Various people on the list have suggested that there are workarounds that render this statement untrue, and since there appear to be real-world examples of commercial products that do use GhostScript without a commercial license, I am going to adopt the approach suggested, hopefully maintaining the letter and spirit of the GPL.

People have all sorts of opinions about what GPL means, but that quoted 
section above seems pretty clear.

When in doubt about a particular usage, it may be best to contact the 
vendor directly for guidance.

No one else can describe a creator's intentions better than the creator. :)


> I have command-line fear, but I guess I'll get over it

As a long-time Mac user I did too, for many years.

But the more I got interested in servers, the more I found myself 
actually enjoying the command line.

Now I've been adding command line interfaces to some of my GUI apps to 
allow uses to automate some operations.  Kinda fun once you get the hang 
of it.

I found this site tremendously helpful for learning CLI:
<http://linuxcommand.org/>


> (when I started programming computers, we didn't even have command lines
> - sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but true.

LOL - yes, it does.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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