Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Over and over again, people ask the question: Is iText free or licensed? This is a strange question because of the word or. It's as if people think that 'free software' doesn't come with a license, or that software that comes with a license can't be 'free software'.

Times flies. I've hardly had any time to blog last month. I'm even late with my monthly analytics report:

The heartbeat of iText in May shows some arrhythmia caused by public holidays in different countries: the first of May in Europe, the Ascension and Pentecost in the Christian countries, Memorial day in the US,... It's amazing that these dates can be visualized in the analytics reports of the site of a technical product.

SOMERSET: But you gotta be a hero...you want to be a champion, well let me tell you, people don't want a champion; they want to eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto, and watch television -
MILLS: Hey, how'd you get like this? I wanna know.
SOMERSET: Ahh...it wasn't one thing, I can tell you that...
MILLS: Go on.
SOMERSET: I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a... virtue.

Saturday is book keeping day. It's the day I check if we have any unpaid invoices at iText Software Belgium, and also if other companies have already paid the invoices we've sent them. Lately, we get plenty of mails (and even phone calls) from offices who go after companies that are in default, so I took a look at the situation at iText Software Belgium (ISB), a company we started in August 2011.

... and why I continue loving Pinterest because I use it.

When I first heard about Pinterest, I thought: What is this about? Let's request an invite.

I thought it was something in-between FlickR and Facebook. I didn't see any use for it, but I loved the interface and its simplicity, so... why not give it a try?

On March 29th, iText organized a summit in Ghent to inform customers and users about the road ahead. Today, we're proud to present the videos that were made of all the different presentations:

The videos of the iText Summit are online!

Remember what I said last week about Spring break and the Easter holidays?
May 7:

May 8:

All the presentations from the iText summit will be available on Parleys soon, but in the meanwhile, please take a look at this movie to get an impression of what you missed ;-)

During my stay in Silicon Valley, I posted an angry (and very personal!!!) blog about "Evil Google" (it's MY opinion, not the opinion of the company I work for), and today I received a comment about it:

I think you should remember that this case isn't just about settling a dispute. Legal precedent might come out that will negatively affect all of us in the software community. One of the biggest legal questions is whether software interfaces and header files are copyrightable. This could terribly impact the open source community that frequently seeks to create open implementations of proprietary systems. I wouldn't think seeing Google pay for their sins would be worth that to you.

I have been thinking a lot about the legal implications, and I think people who are in favor of Google are shortsighted. As a developer (even a developer who has created an API that is used by many other developers), I'm slowly getting convinced that in the long run, APIs would benefit from being copyrightable.