[Fribidi-discuss] License question to the project owners

[Paulo Soares]

I'm an iText (www.lowagie.com/iText) developer. iText is a java library for
the generation of PDF documents that has a dual license, LGPL or MPL/LGPL.

I added some time ago support for bidi text using java.awt.font.TextLayout
to get the order levels. This solution works very well but requires the awt
toolkit and it's the only feature in iText that requires it. Many unix
servers where the library is installed on don't have a X server and use java
1.3 or lower not being able to benefit from the headless option in java 1.4.
Making it work requires PJA or Xvfb but that's always a source of another
batch of problems.

I decided to look around for an awt independent solution to get the order
levels and fribidi came on top of my list not only for conformance reasons
but also because it has a clean architecture, or at least an architecture
that I can understand.

My problems start with the dual licensing of iText. Either I say somewhere
that if you want Arabic without using awt you are restricted to LGPL or, and
that's my request, I get some kind of exception from you for this partial
port to java and the MPL/LGPL license can still be applied even for the
fribidi part.

Best Regards,
Paulo Soares