https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDFAs the commenters above note, the "upgrade" to AGPL was both highly profitable to Lowagie and caused many to shift to an open-source fork.
IMO forks are the great leveler; if your brand strength and your ongoing investment in engineering + community make a license shift viable (and if you retain the trust of your contributors) then everybody wins... but if you make a license shift and just rest on your laurels, forks will destroy your value. I don't know enough about the history to know what happened in this case, but based on the successful exit, I imagine it's somewhere between these two extremes.
I know historically PDFBox is a bit lower level whereas iText was a bit more user friendly, but that's not too big of a deal for me.
https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/AGPLv3-license
Not really AGPL, they just advertise AGPL and mean something else. Avoid.
I personally think the AGPL would win, but it's not something I'd be willing to enter a legal battle over.
You already know that the licensor has his own, idiosyncratic interpretation. He either misunderstands the AGPL (probably clause 7 par 3 b), or he’s trying to deceive you. Both cases can easily lead to hostilities.
“ If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. ”
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
I think the expectation here is that commercial users purchase the AGPL opt-out.
They hit up a company I know because their web-crawler found a PDF that someone generated using their library over a decade ago.
https://beemanmuchmore.com/software-licensing-trolls-apryse-...
I'd avoid it.
Most previous users of pdftk have probably migrated to qpdf by now.