Mislabeled as Open Source

[Philip Borgström]

On both the site and in the readme, QuestPDF is referred to as open source. But the licensing doesn't fulfill the open source definition. It should be labeled as source-available.

[Kevin Thomer]

I was actually going to open an issue for this after discovering this project as well.

Please relabel all references of the license as the QuestPDF License that provides MIT-like rights for non-profit usage and small businesses generating less than $1M in gross annual revenue

Why this is needed

The original MIT license itself does not allow income-based restrictions. As @philipborg mentions the current license also does not meet the OSI definition and is only source-available.

I understand this was a decision that was reached about a year ago in #491 and I'm not looking to fully revisit that thread, I am just requesting the relevant references to MIT be updated to correctly state the new license and references to Open Source be changed to source-available. It is my belief all this is just an oversight from the license change and not intentional misrepresentation.

I have no qualms with your decision to re-license, that is your right, it's just the current state of the website and readme verbiage does not tell a truthful picture that causes confusion

Potential issues with the QuestPDF License

The current license presents a few problematic and unanswered questions that make it challenging to use without answers:

• There is ambiguity on the gross-income measurement. This ambiguity comes from what license is needed once a previously-not-over-$1M-small-business finally exceeds that threshold. Are they suddenly out of compliance or does only the gross income the year they initially get the dependency matter? It's fairly clear that upon an update it would need reevaluation as it's a new distribution. Explicit verbiage on all this would be greatly helpful to small businesses
• There is currently a Transitive Dependency Usage clause that states, and I quote, If you're using QuestPDF as a transitive dependency, you're free to use it under the MIT license without any cost. -- what happens if I create an open source MIT-licensed wrapper around QuestPDF? And then use that wrapper in a commercial offering that generates over $1M in gross revenue? I'm only using the wrapper so the QuestPDF software is a transitive dependency and thus fully free to use under MIT. I doubt this was your desired interpretation of this clause, so again be explicit on what the Transitive Dependency Usage clause applies to.

@philipborg you may wish to know that there is still a maintained branch for the fully-MIT-licensed version of this project here: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/tree/2022.12.X-support

You can fork this fully or use that branch for any reason or use under the standard MIT license rules regardless of income.