My pre-official answer to "the future of QuickPDF"

Hi Marian (and Ingo),

    I agree that, somehow, we need to keep this library progressing. I can well imagine the frustrations of working for free, and that we are going to have difficulty generating any interest in this library, particularly that it is not available for sale anymore from iSed.

    But, we do have the iSed promise that they will be back "soon".  Although I would love to believe that premise, it's been a couple of weeks now, and frankly, it would have been better if that one-liner message was also accompanied with a description of what their future goal will be, such as "... and we will now provide support and develop the library further"

    It is amazing to me that the iSed owners were able to ignore their forum, some of the complaints, or even this forum for nearly 2 years, and now claim that they will be back in business soon. If they do make a comeback, they will have some explaining to do!

    Marian, before we go any further, should we set a date and wait for iSed's next move before we decide anything?

    If, after a specific date (say 1 April), we could then try to move this forum to a more "commercial" solution that would allow perhaps for this forum to grow from 500 users to 50,000.

    To turn this forum into a more "commercial" endeavour, we would need to offer some means of being able to sell the library, and keep the money in escrow to pay iSed back if they come back to life some day - after all, it is their library.

    Thanks for your posting: yes, it has captured my attention.

    Cheers!

Hi Michel,

Hi everybody,

I would like to comment on Marian's proposal above. From my point of view it is totally understandable and acceptable that support beyond bug tracking and fixing cannot be free for everybody. Running a small business myself I understand Marian's position quite well and fully support it.

On the down side there it this ugly thing called intellectual property (IP). While I will not take on the role of iSED (or whatever this company's name will be) I have to have my own business in mind. Putting a software to work in a commercial environment (and this is what we already do with the "offical" library) from my point of view requires that I am legally allowed to do so. I am not a lawyer but I assume that the IP holder would not quietly sit back and watch others making business and profit using their IP. Using software illegally would put my business (and myself) at considerable risk.

To cut the long story short I am more than prepared to invest into the further development of a library such as QuickPDF but I only will be able to do so if the licencing issue is solved. From my point of view the following are possible solutions to this situation:

- complete rewrite of the QuickPDF codebase in order to avoid any copyright infringement

- develop new functionality "outside" the library that is e.g. a separate DLL that interacts with the QuickPDF object

- provide professional support (guaranteed response time etc.) for the library and continue with maintainance activities

Neither do I prefer one option over the other nor do I claim that these are the only options. But I do absolutely agree with others in this forum that the QuickPDF library is good value for money (at least for the time being) but runs far behind recent developments and lacks important features such as appropriate rendering/printing (at least in my opinion). I would be more than happy to support Marian in order to have an up-to-date library at my disposal provided the IP issue is solve satisfyingly.

By the way, Marian I sure hope that you know what you do as doing things on a voluntary basis is quite different from having demanding customers; I can tell you that (no offense meant).

Regards
Udo

Hi!
I think it depends on what you wanna do with the library.
If i think on functions and price 'till now i don't see a real substitute for me.
In the future the missing 1.5-/1.6-specs will be a problem for SOME functions... sure.
If Marian will accomplish the wonder publishing alone a pdf-library with main functions from QuickPDF i'll be one of the first buying it ... but again: i have my doubts if this is possible for a single developer.
In the meantime working here with free source snippets from user to user in a peer to peer manner mustn't be unefficient - look at the open source communities...
Perhaps we can gather here more users with same interests in having few enhancements in QuickPDF and we can hire Marian for developement? For example few weeks ago i ask Marian having the new encryption/decryption (aes 128) in the library. The price was a bit too high for me but if we were more... ;-)
Best regards,
Ingo

And as for me... I agree with everyone.

1. I look forward to a last release of the library from Marian (thank you).
2. This library has no future particularly since it is no longer available for purchase. From that perspective alone, I agree that Marian's efforts would be futile.
   
3. This forum still makes sense to help each other out, as Ingo suggested (thank you Ingo for your continued help with users asking questions).
   

     For my part: I will continue to provide free hosting and basic maintenance for the forum, but that's about it. Although I suggested we find a legal way of "selling" new licenses. it is just too risky to try. From now on, I will be concentrating my efforts on other projects.

    Maybe iSed will prove me wrong, but I doubt it: I have been waiting since 2005.

    Cheers!

Hi There Oneday!

    Thank you for the offer to help. I am curious if any of your suggestions and ideas revolve around the PDF file format, or your ideas are for something else completely different.

    Like you, my time is at a premium, so I select my work and projects very carefully. In that light, EXP Systems takes most of my spare time, and I continue to work on making that grow. My interest in QuickPDF is that it is a PDF library that I rely upon, thus the interest in giving it a place to reside since iSed has disappeared. There, I would be keenly interested in finding a way to get that library to continue to grow, but I just don't see how because of the license restrictions and source code ownership that resides with a dormant iSed.

    Therefore, the only way that I could think of moving forward would be to create a brand new library from scratch.

    Otherwise, I would love to hear your ideas: I could at least provide feedback based on my experience with EXP Systems. You can shoot me an e-mail at exp [at] exp-systems [dot] com.

    Cheers!

Hi Blestan!

Do you think we can implement such functionalities in QuickPDF?
If "yes" we can try it...  We're planning a new version now mainly with a better rendering. Perhaps we can insert your functions?

Best regards,
Ingo

Hi!

You can let it separate from QP and you can upload it (send it to Michel with a describing text) in the library-section for all users.
You can suggest it (if you think that's easy to do) for inserting in QP - Then you can send it to me and we'll post it with the QP-source in the protected source-section.

Best regards,
Ingo

Hi Blestan!

Take ingo <dot> schmoekel <at> ewetel <dot> net

Best regards,
Ingo