My pre-official answer to "the future of QuickPDF"
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Forum Name: General Discussion
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URL: http://www.quickpdf.org/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=676
Printed Date: 22 Nov 24 at 11:18PM
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Topic: My pre-official answer to "the future of QuickPDF"
Posted By: marian_pascalau
Subject: My pre-official answer to "the future of QuickPDF"
Date Posted: 16 Mar 07 at 7:12PM
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Hi there,
in the last few days there were serious discussions about the future of QuickPDF library. Well it seems to me that many of us are seriously worried and I want to use this occasion to answer some of possible questions to you.
I just want to tell you that at the moment I am far away from getting away from this library. I have serious interests improving this library but I am not willing to share my knowledge for free anymore. At the moment I am planning serious investments for future development around this library and I would like to take as much partners as possible with me.
I am talking not only about the future development of this library but about a partnership for how to take the best out of it, with tips, tricks and samples on using it in your production environment.
This is maybe not what you expected till now but I want to offer you a solution where you concentrate on your real problem and let QuickPDF alone to me. Of course that your collaboration is needed but you should not worry about fixing bugs inside this PDF library anymore.
I hope that I have captured your attention and you seriously evaluate my offer for you. For questions I am as usual available at:
support(at)quickpdf.org or
quickpdf(at)qmx.net
or write here if it's a public metter.
Best regards, Marian
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Replies:
Posted By: Michel_K17
Date Posted: 17 Mar 07 at 12:25AM
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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! ------------- Michel |
Posted By: Ingo
Date Posted: 17 Mar 07 at 7:44AM
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Hi to all! I'll go along but a few things should be fixed: This forum should be ever a place with tips and tricks from user to user. This forum should be ever a place for sharing personal code enhancements and bugfixes from user to user. We still should offer the last source and compiled versions 5.21 here. We should offer a special section here for new versions of the library under the care of Marian as the central developer of the library. Fact must be what Michel had said: All prices must be a bit higher than the last iSED-prices 'cause the owner of the library is still iSED... and perhaps one day we have to pay back our charges to iSED. What i don't like is future development from one person and only binaries will be published. There's a lot that can happen to one person... We've seen it with iSED... Without source we can't offer our solutions to customers. If we've a problem with a customer there's a quick fix needed. Like i said - i'll create some polls ;-) Best regards, Ingo |
Posted By: marian_pascalau
Date Posted: 17 Mar 07 at 6:38PM
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Hi Michel,
I have good reasons to believe that iSED cannot proppery support this library. They made a lot of programming mistakes and it will be hard to go further.
The only question is just what will hapen here. It is highly probable that it is up to us to decide the future of this library. And considering the reaction of some users I see it in red.
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Posted By: cverhoff
Date Posted: 26 Mar 07 at 8:30PM
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Hey Gang,
I would really like to see you proceed with the development and support for this product. This site has been a really great resource for me as a QuickPDF developer. I really love it and it has allowed me to create some really great applications. I know that I would be willing to pay a reasonable yearly or 6-month maintenence/support fee. I am sure the serious users of QuickPDF feel the same.
Thanks A Million,
Curtis
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Posted By: ue14
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 3:25AM
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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 |
Posted By: Ingo
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 5:46AM
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Hi! It's not easy creating a new pdf-library. Keep in mind how long QuickPDF is on the market and how many bugs were inside first (and still now?). For my understanding it's impossible creating and supporting a new pdf-library as a one-man-company. We've seen what happens to iSED with only less peoples. Marian's idea making an interface into QuickPDF for new external features seems the best for me. Payable support would be okay, too. The only question are there enough people for this to feed Marian? Anyway i think this site should go back to the roots with users helping users... sources... hints and tricks... samples. Best regards, Ingo |
Posted By: marian_pascalau
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 9:07AM
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Hi Udo( http://www.quickpdf.org/forum/member_profile.asp?PF=138&FID=11 - Before I will properly answer to all your question I just want to answer to the last one. Please believe me that I know what I am doing. I have spent a lot of extra time because of my commitments. And I will not lie to you, I still have delays but I have never left consciously a feature uncompleted. The only problem is that despite the simpler structure of PDF documents I am still struggling with complicated standards which I was not expecting. One the other side one thing is clear. I will write my own library in order to get read of license restrictions. Till then I can offer only IT consultancy service in order to help you solve actual QuickPDF problems (or others). And to Ingo I have another answer. The 5.21 library is quite stable. There are a lot of problems but I don't believe that someone will solve them in a peer to peer manner without a serious contribution of a almost full time developer. As much as I know the QuickPDF reach long time ago its limits and with each of my version I am seriously thinking throwing away parts of the old code. I will come back on this, best regards, Marian
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Posted By: swb1
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 10:21AM
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I agree with Marian. I’ve studied the source enough to believe that without some major overhaul the QuickPDF library will soon be largely obsolete. I also agree that if I were in his position I would be very tempted to replace entire sections of code in order to accomplish the goal of updating to current PDF specifications. In the ideal world we would have some sort dialog with the holder of the intellectual property rights so that this could happen in a way that would allow Marian and other developers to make contributions to the existing library and potentially get compensated for their efforts without the fear of legal action against them. As far as anyone can tell there will be no such dialog. Were there such a dialog, I suspect that the owner(s) of Quick PDF could continue to make some cash off of the sale of licenses while developers here could make some cash off of enhancements and bug fixes.They cretainly are not making money with a web site that says "www.isedquickpdf.com will return soon" - A home page to be proud of, for sure:) Unfortunately I suspect that we will either; never hear from the owner(s) or the owner(s) will only show up when someone here has made enough of an impact and has deep enough pockets to be considered as the target of a lawsuit. I doubt anyone is going to take that chance.
Regardless without such dialog, as I see it, the QuickPDF library is ultimately a dead end. Sincerely, |
Posted By: Ingo
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 12:24PM
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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 |
Posted By: swb1
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 2:21PM
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Ingo, Please don’t misunderstand me. I am using QuickPDF for rending and text extraction and while I hope to find an economical substitute for rending I am quite satisfied with the text extraction. I expect to be using QuickPDF for several more years and so I am thrilled that this website exists. I am also not a big fan of open source projects as they tend to stagnate over time, becoming unsupported and ultimately obsolete. For most of us, the best thing that could happen is that the commercial effort on QuickPDF, some how or another, be rekindled. While QuickPDG.org is managing to keep the library on life-support it cannot possibly thrive into the future without investment and sales. Entropy is the ultimate fate of any software that is neglected. |
Posted By: Michel_K17
Date Posted: 27 Mar 07 at 11:30PM
And as for me... I agree with everyone.
Maybe iSed will prove me wrong, but I doubt it: I have been waiting since 2005.  Cheers! ------------- Michel |
Posted By: oneday
Date Posted: 24 Oct 07 at 5:31AM
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Hi,
I only just recently joined the forum.
I only just recently purchased a source licence.
I have been using isedquickpdf since 2002 on and off.
I am not a great programmer.
I think that it could be possible for us to create something together that might generate enough cash for us to enable marian to write a new library.
I have various applications that I have written in delphi that I do not currently have on the market that might generate some cash.
I have some ideas for new applications.
If anyone is interested please let me know and I will supply more information.
I have a fulltime job and can only spend extra time after hours.
Regards,
Oneday.
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Posted By: Michel_K17
Date Posted: 24 Oct 07 at 8:20PM
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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! ------------- Michel |
Posted By: blestan
Date Posted: 12 Jan 08 at 9:44AM
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Hi All i have already done some work ... i'm working on a pdf format parser since last year ... for now it's pretty usable... it parses internal objects .. and works under delphi and freepascal but i cannot make this a full pdf library alone ... if somebody is interested in coding/testing please contact me at blestant@yahoo.com regards blestan tabakov |
Posted By: Ingo
Date Posted: 13 Jan 08 at 7:55AM
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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 |
Posted By: blestan
Date Posted: 13 Jan 08 at 8:08AM
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hi ingo, if you want i will send you my code - my general idea is to build a open source lib with the same functions as quickpdf but w/o any code borrowings form it ... may be he can just use some ideas but recode all the stuff ... in y parser i'm using memory mapped io and i can parse objects from 1,5 gb file for several secs but i do not know what to do with the objects after that i need more deep pdf standarts understanding any ideas? |
Posted By: Ingo
Date Posted: 13 Jan 08 at 2:52PM
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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 |
Posted By: blestan
Date Posted: 14 Jan 08 at 1:55AM
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please give me an email ... i will clean up the forlder and will send it to you as is just to take a look ...if you think that it can be usefull then i will write commrnts.. blestan tabakov |
Posted By: Ingo
Date Posted: 14 Jan 08 at 4:05AM
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Hi Blestan! Take ingo <dot> schmoekel <at> ewetel <dot> net Best regards, Ingo |