I would like to know whether iText 5.4.2 is a open source. I know it is described here well:
http://itextpdf.com/terms-of-use/index.php
But I am confused as the page also says this:
Buying such a license is mandatory as soon as you develop commercial
activities distributing the iText software inside your product or
deploying it on a network without disclosing the source code of your
own applications under the AGPL license. These activities include:
offering paid services to customers as an ASP, serving PDFs on the fly
in the cloud or in a web application, shipping iText with a closed
source product.
AGPL stands for Affero GPL.
It basically says, when you want to sell a software product that includes iText or use iText in any commercial webservice, than you need to buy a license.
If you do an open source (with an approriate license) or private project, than you are fine and don't need to buy a license.
The short answer is, yes, iText is open source. The long answer is the next paragraph.
The Affero GPL provides some restrictions, which they would be happy to remove, if you buy a license. For example, you must disclose your source code for apps based on iText, but if you do not want to do that, you can buy a commercial license, freeing you from the AGPL.
The last iText version released under a less restrictive license was iText 2.1.7 (java) and 4.1.6 (c#). It was both released under MPL / LGPL. Even though the authors removed it from the sourceforge page you are able to find it in many places in the web (e.g. maven central). Those versions are from 2009 and still do their job fine, if you need the latest pdf features however (newer versions of digital signatures, ...) or experience a bug you may have to use the latest version...
