Frankly, I find it utterly shocking that this program is not offered under a GPL or other open source license. The developers are clearly acquainted with the concept of open source, since they so freely avail themselves of the phpBB forum software. I have a hard time believing that any project could hang on to antiquated Microsoft-era "freeware" licensing terms on one hand, while speaking so grandiosely, on the other, about bringing the world's information to everyone.

This software would be a worldwide standard by now if it had been released under an appropriate license. Every sale that would have hypothetically lost would have been made up in its ubiquity.

It's tragic and saddening in this context, more than in any other I've ever seen.

While we would love to see Prince become a ubiquitous part of the computing landscape, we need to balance that against the fact that if no one paid for it, we would starve, which would affect our ability to work on it as hard as we currently do.

That said, we do our best to contribute patches back to the open source libraries that we use, and we have released some font code, which includes support for TrueType font subsetting and OpenType layout tables and could be useful for other applications. We hope to release more open source code in the future.

I'm glad to hear you're making tentative steps in the direction of more liberal licensing. Have you considered dual licensing, and charging the same as current rates for the "supported" version?

I suspect you'd still find you had the same rate of paid adoption you have now amongst large clients capable of paying -- thus allowing you to continue paying your developers -- while seeing a larger widespread uptake and name recognition. Don't underestimate the power of Slashdot and Digg to make the PrinceXML name known, if you angle it right.

I am very happy with the Prince license. It allows me to experiment freely and if anything commercial happens then we pay.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators

I, too, am fine with the Prince license. I was happy that I could spend literally months using the full version with only a tiny watermark on the front page for development. Once I had developed the templates and CSS required for the project, we then paid for the full version. $495 USD may be a bit salty for an individual, but it's cost is similar to purchasing software like PhotoShop and InDesign (it's actually less as these cost $650 each).

FWIW, I never did get the "Cascading Style Sheets — Designing for the Web" book when I purchased the software, but that wasn't a big deal to me as I was buying the sofware license for the ability to use Prince and not for the book.

So far we've been using Prince for our online magazine, Advanced Aquarist, for producing monthly PDF's of our content ( http://www.advancedaquarist.com/pdf ). Shortly we will be using Prince to publish our first set of books on CreateSpace.com based on the content from our website:

2007 Volume (12 issues of content):
https://www.createspace.com/3343987

2008 Volume (first 6 months):
https://www.createspace.com/3354927

As an aside, Prince works great for producing PDF's that are compatible with CreateSpace's PDF requirements. I uploaded the Prince produced PDF's with no modification to our CreateSpace account and ordered a proof and it looked great! This software has saved me hours of typesetting PDF's. For example, I decided this weekend to get the first 6 months of our 2008 content into PDF format for CreateSpace and I bet I only spent 12 hrs on it and I'm done and that's including setting up the CreateSpace store!

Shane

I agree; I wish I could have a free full version of every soft I need just with a tiny P on the upper right corner....