Comment by philjohnson
1 year ago
(1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is essentially open sourced :) so perhaps I could use it here.
Since a lot of the basic functionality I've added so far is also covered by more permissible packages like the ones you mentioned, I've started out just using those. But thanks for bringing that up, I'll revisit using MuPDF for redaction and other features
(2) I went with pdf-lib-plus-encrypt because the original pdf-lib doesn't have functionality for password-protecting PDFs, and since pdf-lib-plus-encrypt does, I used it so I could have that feature
> Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is essentially open sourced :) so perhaps I could use it here.
Open source isn't just about the source code being available (and when making web apps, there is often a compile step which makes the browser facing code not source code), but also about the license under which it is available.
It is in every sense of the word technically not open source.
Weird that a google search for "pdf redact online" or "pdf redactor online" doesn't show your site in the first page.
Hopefully it will soon, the site is brand new :)
Is your code available?
I would assume not based on their objection to AGPL libraries.
not yet available as open source. Open-source has two main purposes I think: trust, and customizing/integrating it into other products.
On the first part, since everything happens in the browser, anyone can see the html/javascript and inspect the Network tab and see that no network requests are made that send their PDF anywhere.
And on the second part, I think most people who use the software aren't developers and won't want to modify it, and I don't particularly see a use case for integrating this software into another one, outside maybe an internal corporate scenario.
Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version, similar to what Sejda does.
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Thanks for the insight. Yes, the AGPL isn't a problem for me - I didn't check your licence as I could just view source :)