Bruno Lowagie
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Bruno Lowagie
Bruno Lowagie is the original developer of iText, an open source PDF library first released in 2000. He's also the author of the “iText in Action” books, published by Manning Publications. Together with his wife, he founded iText Group (2008), a company with subsidiaries in the US (2009), Belgium (2011), and Singapore (2015). The couple grew the business from start-up to exit. Bruno left iText Group in 2018, and focuses on helping start-ups with technical founders as a business angel ever since. In 2021, he wrote a book about his journey as an open source developer and entrepreneur: “Entreprenerd: Building a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with Open Source Software.”
Heartbleed, an Apache License Business Model Failure?
The two year old HeartBleed bug that was recently discovered in OpenSSL and that affects millions of internet users, reveals a similar problem that could have a serious impact on the way we look at open source software. Companies such as Cisco have built expensive applications on top of OpenSSL. Security consultants have been paid good money to guarantee that OpenSSL was safe. But the OpenSSL project itself was driven by a core of only four unpaid volunteers. The German engineer Robin Seggelmann is now taking the blame for the error. His code was verified by Dr. Stephen Henson who overlooked the bug. It would be unfair to blame these two individuals for the problems caused by Heartbleed. They made two mistakes. The second mistake was a minor error in their code. Although this error took huge proportions, they should be forgiven for that error. Their first mistake was their choice to make their code available under the Apache Software License. That mistake is more problematic.
iText Group
iText Group is a global leader in PDF technology. With iText DITO, we provide business users with a powerful and convenient document generation solution. iText Group has a long history of high-quality software development. Our flagship product, the open-source iText Core library, is used by tens of thousands of developers worldwide to add PDF capabilities to their applications.
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Stop laying the blame for Heartbleed on open source
Security experts acknowledge that open source is the best model for crypto, so how do we drive improvements to the model for creating security-critical infrastructure? Read More »
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Three Lessons Learned From A Technology Entrepreneur’s Journey: It Takes People, Patience, And Persistence
...it takes much, much more than a great idea to build a business — no matter how wondrous the technology. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to speak with many technology professionals who got tired of working for someone else and parlayed their talents into starting new businesses. What they consistently have shared is that technical chops and interesting ideas are only half the story — or maybe even only 25% of it. Success is more dependent on developing the people skills and coping mechanisms to deal with fickle customers, difficult employees, nervous investors, constantly probing competitors, and incursions by larger tech giants. Oh, and one more thing — tending to the needs of one’s family and personal well-being....Bruno Lowagie has a word for the individual with technical skills who channels their technical chops into a business idea — “entreprenerd.”
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Using Open Source PDF Technology to Solve the Unstructured Data Problem in Healthcare
If there’s one major challenge to single out in healthcare IT today, it would be leveraging the growth and usage of big data. While consumer IT made big advances in the past decade to get a handle of data by marking up content, indexing it, and annotating it for use, enterprise, and healthcare IT in particular, still need to catch up on making data actionable...This article provides insights into how using the Portable Document Format (PDF) and accompanying tools within healthcare organizations can be a powerful way to help solve the unstructured data challenge, speed up processes, and reduce the costs for document handling.
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