Users can clone the project that is being hosted on GitHub

May 22, 2014 15:22 GMT  ·  By

Large companies like Google don't really like open source projects, although their Chrome browser is based on Chromium. Now, the PDF rendering engine that is being used in Google Chrome has been released as open source.

The PDF rendering engine in Google Chrome is called PDFium and up until now the project has not been opened to the public. It's unclear what made them change their mind, but now users can download the PDFium source.

Even if it's now open source, it's governed by a new BSD license that has some particular conditions. For example, the redistributions of the source code must retain the copyright notice, a list of conditions, and a disclaimer, the reproduction of the binary has to respect the same conditions, and neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software.

Like most of the open source projects, it is available on GitHub and you can easily clone the project with the following command:

git clone https://pdfium.googlesource.com/name

It's unlikely that PDFium will be used in other major projects, but it's good to see that Google is trying to stay friendly with the open source community.