Hi,
Thought to inquire under the same thread as it relates to a commercial situation. Forgive me for my question, a newbie dev here without any experience in licensing.
I'm currently working for a software company and I'm in a team that is developing a website for a public library and developing a custom ebook viewer to view the ebooks. Rather than writing code to support epub, i thought of converting epub to pdf instead to reduce the effort spent.
Since calibre is under GPL v3, i am quite confused on whether i can use calibre in our application. Basically we have a custom ebook viewer embedded on the library site. We have a server that will stream the pdf output to the viewer. We would be using Java in the server side(a servlet) hosted via tomcat and will be calling calibre via runtime through command line options. Calibre-windows will be installed in the server located at the library by us. I don't think our server code will be licensed under gpl unfortunately. Calibre will be used for purely for server side conversions. No modification of calibre will take place. The pdf output will be the one that will be streamed to the viewer.
Java snippet:
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ebook-convert... <command-line here>");
Would this be permissible? (Am confused on legalities of the gpl especially the aggregates and derived works so I wanted to ask here first before we get into a legal mess/also read a little about what happened to hamstersoft) are there any steps that we must do instead of the above? (i.e the users/client should be the one to install calibre on the server, etc)
Tried to look for commercial alternatives but so far only calibre meets our expectations.
Sorry the long post and thanks,
Gary Lisbon
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