Hi, author and maintainer of Tabula (https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula). We've been trying to contact you about the "Tabula Pro" version that you are offering.
Am I reading the repos correctly? It looks like Extractable copied Tabula (MIT) to its own repo rather than forking it, removed the attribution, and then tried to re-license it as Apache 2.0. If so, that would be pretty fucked up.
Not really. They import tabula_py, which is a Python wrapper around tabula-java (the library of which I'm a maintainer).
Still, I would have loved at least a heads up from the team that sells Tabula Pro. I know they're not required to do so, but hey, they're kinda piggybacking on Tabula's "reputation".
If you control the Tabula trademark (which doesn't necessarily require a formal registration), you may be able to prohibit them from using the TabulaPro name. That's exactly what trademark law is for.
William, the intention of "TabulaPro" is to give the developers a chance to use a single library instead of switching ExtractTable for images and tabula-py for text PDFs.
What do you recommend us to do, to not make you feel we made a dick move.
"commercialize the original author's work with the author"
- No, but let me highlight this, any extraction with tabula-py is not commercialized - you can look into the wrapper too :) or even compare the results with tabula-py vs tabulaPro.
Copying the TabulaPro description here, "TabulaPro is a layer on tabula-py library to extract tables from Scan PDFs and Images." - we respect every effort of the contributors & author, never intended to plagiarize.
I understand the misinterpretation here is that we are charging for the open-sourced library because of the name. We already informed author in the email about unpublishing the library, this morning, I just deleted the project and came here to mention it is deleted :)
Sorry, Saradhi, I don't think you can reasonably claim there was no intention to plagiarize. Adding a "pro" to something is clearly meant to suggest it's the paid version of something. And it's equally clear that "TabulaPro" is derived from "Tabula".
It may be that you didn't realize that people would see your appropriation as wrong, although I have a hard time believing that as well given that the author tried to contact you and was ignored. As they say, "The wicked flee when no man pursueth."
So what I see here is somebody knowingly doing something dodgy and then panicking when getting caught. If you'd really like to make amends, I'd start with some serious introspection on what you actually did, and an honest conversation with the original author that hopefully includes a proper [1] apology.
And I'm going add it's really weird that your answer ("No, No, Zero") is exactly the same as what the library author said [1] two hours before you posted. But you do that again without acknowledging the author, and with just enough format difference that it's not a copy-paste. It's extremely hard for me to imagine you didn't read what he said before writing that; it's just too similar.
Feel free to reachme at manuel at jazzido dot com