alt Hacker NewsThe classname "lowagie" will live forever in the memory of Java developers, but we've all abandoned itext for the fork:
https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDFReplies
nogridbag • last Thursday at 5:48 PM
I thought most were using Apache PDFBox these days. Anyone have any thoughts on how the two libraries compare in 2025? I'm particularly interested in programatic creation of PDFs.
I know historically PDFBox is a bit lower level whereas iText was a bit more user friendly, but that's not too big of a deal for me.
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whizzx • last Thursday at 4:52 PM
Does it support tagged documents and PDF2.0 as well?
For some context on that infamous classname, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/13515403 and https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/
As the commenters above note, the "upgrade" to AGPL was both highly profitable to Lowagie and caused many to shift to an open-source fork.
IMO forks are the great leveler; if your brand strength and your ongoing investment in engineering + community make a license shift viable (and if you retain the trust of your contributors) then everybody wins... but if you make a license shift and just rest on your laurels, forks will destroy your value. I don't know enough about the history to know what happened in this case, but based on the successful exit, I imagine it's somewhere between these two extremes.