Artifex Software, Inc. and Hancom, Inc. have ended their legal fight with a private deal. Neither side will disclose what it contains, though.
Artifex had sued in the federal court for the Northern District of California, under case No. 3:16-cv-06982. At issue was how Hancom used Ghostscript, which Artifex releases as open source under the GNU General Public License. The two sides read the license differently. Even so, they reached a friendly resolution, since both respect copyright protection and the open source philosophy.
Artifex builds core technology for working with documents. For more than 20 years, it has sold software to big global clients. As a result, its customers and partners include HP, Kyocera, Ricoh, Adobe, IBM, Intel, Xerox, Google, Ernst & Young, Dropbox, BlackBerry, Siemens and LG Electronics, among many others.
Today it has three main products. Ghostscript is a page description language interpreter, widely used to render and convert PDF, PostScript, PCL and XPS files. MuPDF is a lightweight PDF and XPS interpreter with the full set of interactive PDF features. Meanwhile, SmartOffice is a mobile suite that lets users view, edit, create and print Microsoft Office files. Artifex is based in Novato, California, while it also has offices in North America, Europe and Asia.
Hancom, by contrast, focuses on office software that helps people and organizations create, edit, share and protect documents. After 27 years in business, it is best known at home for its Korean word processor, Hangul. At the same time, it offers Thinkfree office NEO in more than 20 countries. Hancom also supplies much of the software for Korea’s e-Government program, which uses digital technology to modernize public services. The company is headquartered in Pangyo Techno Valley, South Korea, with offices in the USA, Belgium, China and other Asian countries.
