[poppler] Commercial Licensing of Poppler

[jcupitt at gmail.com]

On 22 February 2016 at 15:59, Hari Pravin <hari at ec.is> wrote:
> We are considering Poppler Utils "pdftocairo" and "pdftoppm" to be used as
> part of a SAAS solution that is under development. As the licensing of our
> solution is not compatible with GPL, I am not sure if Poppler can be used
> along with it without acquiring a commercial license.

I'm not a lawyer, but for a SAAS solution I don't think the GPL
matters. It mostly concerns itself with distribution, and you're not
distributing anything, you're selling a service. The AGPL would block
this, but plain GPL is fine.

If you want to sell a tarball of all your code that includes a GPL
binary, I think this is the FAQ entry you need:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

So it's OK as long as the GPL part and the non-GPL parts are obviously separate.

For example, you could have a module in your office365 clone which
offered previews of PDF documents in a web browser (and that module
could use pdftocairo behind the scenes). But if all your SAAS solution
did was PDF previews in a web browser, your thing would clearly be a
derived work, a simple layer over pdftocairo, and you would find all
your code was GPL'd too.

You'd need to comply with the other term of the GPL as well, so you'd
need to include the sources to pdftocairo and so on.

John