Itext - jasperreports - license

[brick777]

Hi

I have a question about itext in jasperreports. I know that itext is on AGPL license, but I heard that itext has exception for jasperreports. Is it true that when I using itext trought by jasperreports, it is on LGPL license and I can use it for non opensource projects? There is some official information about this?

[Teodor Danciu]

Hi,

JasperReports uses iText version 2.1.7, which was released under an MPL/LGPL dual license.

Later releases of iText, starting with 5.0 have moved onto AGPL, which prevents use in commercial products.

We had a brief attempt to upgrade to iText 5+ a few years ago, based on some contract we had with iText, but decided to pull it back as we experienced difficulties.

Right now, if you need iText 5+ (although from JRL we don't need any feature that did not exist in iText 2.1.7), you could go with a separate JR exporter project which can be found here:

https://github.com/Jaspersoft/jasperreports-pdf-lib5

This exporter is also AGPL, to comply with iText 5+ license.

If you indeed purchase iText 5 commercial license, I'm sure we can arrange for a commercial one for the exporter.

Right now, the exporter is work in progress, but if there is enough interest, I'm sure it can be finished soon.

Thanks,
Teodor

 

 

[brick777]

Hi Teodor ,

Thank you for replay.

I don't need itext 5, but I would like to use newest jasperreports library version on web application. So I thought that in newest version of JR is using itext on AGPL license.
But you sure that newest version JR don't using itext on AGPL version?

Thanks.

[Teodor Danciu]

Hi,

JRL uses a forked version of iText 2.1.7 in which we implemented a custom feature to deal with fonts that have ligatures. We stayed with iText 2.1.7 under the terms of the MPL.

JRL built-in PDF exporter would not even work with newer iText, because they changed the package names when moving to iText 5+.

Thanks,
Teodor