[jazzido]

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.

Feel free to reachme at manuel at jazzido dot com

[staticautomatic]

Edit: See reply below

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.

https://github.com/tabulapdf

https://github.com/ExtractTable/tabulapro

[jazzido]

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".

[bruckie]

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.

(IANAL)

[wpietri]

You're being much more polite here than I would be. Even if it isn't illegal, what they've done is a giant dick move.

[saradhi]

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.

TIA

[wpietri]

Well, let me ask a few questions:

Did you ask permission of the original author to use a derived name?

Did you discuss your plan to commercialize the original author's work with the author? Before starting out?

Since starting a commercial project, how much money have you given to the original author?

[saradhi]

- No, No, Zero.

"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 :)

[jazzido]

Author here.

1) No. 2) No. 3) Zero.

[staticautomatic]

Thanks for clarifying.