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07 December 2009, 13:45

Palm sued by Artifex over PDF renderer GPL violation

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Artifex Software has announced it has filed a lawsuit against Palm Inc's because of Palm's use of Artifex's muPDF high performance PDF rendering engine. Artifex say that Palm's use of the code in the Pre's "PDF viewer", without GPL licensing the entire application that makes use of the GPL code, requires a commercial licence. The muPDF software is available under the GPL or a commercial licence; Artifex says Palm has not bought a commercial licence and that, for this reason, it has filed the lawsuit.

Miles Jones, president of Artifex, says the licensing is not complex; "Comply with the terms of the GPL, sign an OEM license agreement with Artifex, or do not distribute our software" and he points to over 100 companies with existing commercial licenses for Artifex software. Artifex produce a range of renderers and interpreters for various page description languages, including the popular Ghostscript interpreter for PostScript and PDF files.

(djwm)

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