I develop a piece of software that uses AGPL licensed iText7. The licensing options are therefore GPL and AGPL. The software is to be installed locally and acts as a plugin to a proprietary desktop application.
This PDF manipulation software needs to work with very specific PDFs that contain very specific proprietary, non-Unicode fonts. This means, the test suite must include such PDFs.
I see the following options:
- Embed the publisher-specific fonts that our clients' publisher requires them to use. Effectively those fonts are "all rights reserved" and not available for purchase.
- Use a proprietary alternative as stand-in font that has a proper commercial license, like the Monotype Imaging EULA.
- Use a font under SIL Open Font License as stand-in.
Option 1 is technically preferable because it tests the software precisely like the client will use it. Also no need to make the software work with stand-ins. However, it's likely to be problematic licensing-wise because of the lack of a proper font license. Could we have a test suite that we do not publish under GPL terms and keep it secret instead, despite testing a software that has an AGPL component?
Option 2 might allow us to distribute the test suite documents, if the respective font license can be interpreted in such a way. (In the case of the Monotype Imaging EULA that is still debatable, but I don't want to make this the topic of this question – commercial font licenses vary in their terms.) Would it be possible to exempt the test documents from the GPL license, despite the software itself and the test suite being under GPL?
Option 3 seems to be unproblematic, both from a technical as well as a licensing perspective. Is that correct?