Belgian government uses unregistered shareware?

Let me start by giving you some information about “De Lijn“. “De Lijn” is a Belgian company from the government that is responsible for bus and tram in Flanders (Flanders is a part of Belgium). If you ever visit Flanders and take a public bus or tram, you will be traveling with “De Lijn”.

Yesterday I was checking the timetables for the tram that drives along the coast and downloaded the PDF file with that information on it. I was a bit surprised to see that “PDF created with pdfFactory trial version www.pdffactory.com” was printed on every page.

When you take a look on the site of pdfFactory, you can read

Trial version prints a small banner on each page. Purchasing will remove the banner.

Obviously, “De Lijn” doesn’t work with a purchased version of pdfFactory. And for those of you thinking that they are testing this software out, to see whether it will make a good candidate for purchase: I can assure you that this notice is already there for a very long time.

Dissurion thinks it’s time to pay.