Free is a word which means very different things to different people. The Open Source community often talks about free as in Air and Free as in Beer (meaning free from limitations and free of any cost to use).
But ‘free’ software still has costs. You still have to evaluate the alternatives, you have to work out how to use it and you have to support it and provide much of your own support. Even if a library has no ‘license’ costs, there is a large time cost. Free can often turn out to be very expensive!
JPedal is developed by my Company (IDRsolutions) which is a small UK software company and I work full-time in the business. If you contact us, I may well be the person who responds. I also have a large team of full-time developers which is how we can do daily builds, 6 weekly releases, answer questions and provide support. This is a large cost which we fund from sales, support and consultancy of our PDF library.
Until 2011, we did make available an Open Source version of JPedal under an LGPL licence but it was not financially viable for us to continue to follow this model. The last release OS release (4.93) is over 10 years behind the current version of JPedal in terms of enhancements, fixes and is not supported by us.
JPedal is a commercial PDF library, so it is not free (and it cannot realistically be because no income means no money to fund development and support). OEM customers also get access to the source code so they have free access to the product in the sense they are not limited – they can alter it if they want.
Commercial users get free support in the sense we charge everyone a yearly fee to cover general support costs.
There is a free trial version of all our software, so users can easily test it. And we do offer a online PDF to Image converter which is powered by JPedal.
So while JPedal is not free, we do make it very easy to evaluate and we provide a lot of value. Our customers (many of whom have stayed with us for 20 years) tell us they continue to use our PDF library because it turns out to be much cheaper than the free alternatives.