Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by williamstein on Thursday April 02, 2020 @05:59PM (#22764346)

Their website and marketing of this fact (is it a fact?) is very confusing or misleading. The comparison at https://pdfjs.express/pdfjs-vs-express says "PDF.js is an open-source PDF library that was created by Mozilla in 2011 to let you open and render PDFs in web browsers using JavaScript. PDF.js Express is a fully-featured commercial PDF.js viewer with a modern and customizable UI."

I would really like to know whether or not "PDF.js Express" is open source. Why? Because I've done a lot of work on react + pdf.js already (for a latex editor), and it's been high on my todo list to add annotation features. So PDF.js express significantly overlaps with something I'm very seriously planning to do...

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by williamstein on Thursday April 02, 2020 @06:05PM (#22764387)

Evidently I should clarify that by "open source", I mean "released under an OSI approved license" (https://opensource.org/licenses). Maybe robocop2018 means "open source" in the sense of "there is possibly minified non-human readable source code that you can look at under a very restrictive non-OSI license"?

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by patrickaljord on Thursday April 02, 2020 @07:38PM (#22765000)

PDF.js Express is not open source.

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by robocop2018 on Thursday April 02, 2020 @08:44PM (#22765367)

It is available under dual AGPL/commercial license so indeed it's open source by any definition. We'll clarify this on the site. Thanks for feedback

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by phonon on Thursday April 02, 2020 @09:50PM (#22765698)

https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/search?q=agpl&unscop... ?

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by niknikson on Thursday April 02, 2020 @07:32PM (#22764967)

Thank you for your feedback and question. My apologies if it’s unclear. The source code for the UI is available on GitHub [1], but is minified in the download package for efficiency. Note that even though the code is "open source" in that repo, we still have a custom license [2]. [1] https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui [2] https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/blob/6.2/LICENSE

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by mkl on Friday April 03, 2020 @05:35AM (#22767591)

The license reads "WebViewer React UI project/codebase or any derived works is only permitted in solutions with an active commercial PDFTron WebViewer license. For exact licensing terms please refer to your commercial WebViewer license. For use in other scenario, please contact [email protected]".

That is a proprietary source-available license, very much not open source at all.

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by juuul on Friday April 03, 2020 @12:30AM (#22766318)

Please don't use the term open source, not even in quotes, if your code is not available under a license that meets the Open Source Definition or the Free Software Definition.

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by detaro on Thursday April 02, 2020 @09:13PM (#22765519)

So which is it? robocop2018 is claiming it's AGPL/commercial dual-licensed, but you say it just has the custom license and that's the only license in the repo?

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Re:Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, a... by robocop2018 on Friday April 03, 2020 @08:39PM (#22775238)

We are in the process of updating the site. The product will be licensed under dual GPL/commercial terms (re: what it means see bit.ly/2JD0Yj0)

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