It's very similar with Ghostscript, all you are doing is integrating with it and promoting it, it's up to the customer to download it, and it's up to Ghostscript to decide if they are licensed to do that for free or to pay for it. The company who sell it can't really complain, if anything we are promoting their product by encoraging our users to buy theirs as well. We tell our customers that we integrate with it and it's up to them to buy it.
We do that with many products including a PDF printer similar to Ghostscript (the one we use has to be paid for if our customers want to use it). It's up to them to legally obtain a copy of Ghostscript. It sounds to me like you are just choosing to 'integrate' your product with Ghostscript, giving people the choice to use it or not. So in short, what you have in mind IMHO obeys the license conditions of the current Ghostscript version. And downloading, installing and just using the current Ghostscript version is perfectly legal, it is explictly allowed, encouraged and free of charge by the distributor. And I am pretty sure they cannot charge you for making the default configuration matching the signature of the current Ghostscript version.Įverything else happens by the user of the software - whatever conversion utility he installs is up to him - it is his responsibility, not yours, to use only legally obtained software for this task. They obviously cannot charge you for designing your program in a way it can run an arbitrary command line utility with a configurable name and configurable parameters for PDF conversion. It is available for download as source and binary archives, supporting 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms, but can be easily installed from the default software repositories of many Linux distributions.IANAL, but as long as you do not distribute Ghostscript, you do not make any copies of the program or parts of it, and you do not build any "derived work" from it, Artifex has no legal foothold against you.
It is a cross-platform software that supports all GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as the commercial Microsoft Windows OS. The program is written entirely in the C programming language and can only be used from a console environment. The independent JPEG Group (IJG) library, the zlib library and the PNG library are used in the Ghostscript package. Ghostscript is comprised of a various components, including a PostScript interpreter, a PDF interpreter, an utility that converts PostScript files to PDF ones and vice versa, as well as a Ghostscript library, which implements filtering and graphics capabilities. Key features include the ability to convert files written in the PostScript language to various other raster formats, allows users to print PostScript (PS) documents on printers that don't feature support for PostScript printing, view PostScript file on displays, convert PDF files to a wide range of file formats, a PostScript to PDF convert, as well as a PDF to PostScript converter. Also known as AFPL Ghostscript, the project can rasterize PostScript files for a wide range of printers, screen preview, image file formats, and other devices.
Ghostscript is an open source processor, interpreter and converter for the PostScript language, as well as for the Portable Document Format (PDF).