Or open sourcing it?

This seems like one of those complex-enough areas that having multiple groups and companies contribute to a common good could really pay off for everyone.

I agree with both of you. Our wrappers are currently very tightly glued to the rest of the product, and have a lot of hacks (hint: PDFJS documentation is not very rich, they have barely touched their documentation since they came out). So what we have is in no good state to release, unfortunately :( But if someone does initiate serious work, we will jump in with our contributions.

But to your points: because there is no good open source initiative that does what PDFJS Express does, commercial providers like PDFJS Express and PSPDFKit are able to build pricy SaaS offerings.

I agree. I would definitely love to integrate (and improve) this as part of my SAAS product, and I would spend way more than $400/year in effort on it. However, I can't possibly use or buy this as is, because it isn't open source. For comparison, my company pays for the CodeMirror "moral license"...

$400/month is what PDFJS express is charging. $400/yr would have been a little difficult to swallow too, but this amount is just absurd for a product where most of the underlying technology is open-source.

Pdf.js Express is US$375/month, or US$4500/year.

No, it's $440 / month if you look at the actual pay-per-month option.

Wow. This will be a good example in GPL versus MIT license debates...

Actually express is already open sources ( see other messages ) and will be licensed under dual commercial/AGPL terms ... like iText ( bit.ly/2JD0Yj0 ), another popular PDF OSS

Actually it's NOT, you're quote "working on it". Stop spreading misinformation. Right now it's 100% commercially licensed in a public repo. Not open source in any way, shape, or form.

Yes! +1