Many products integrate with many other products all the time and as long as they are not shipping those third-party products to their customers, they don't have to worry about licencing.Īs a bigger example. 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. 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.

Ghostscript commercial license price