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> Every time someone reinvents the wheel, it becomes a little rounder.

Not sure if this particular library is an improvement, but even if it serves nothing but the author’s enjoyment, or education, it’s a win.

It makes sense to me. They made a PDF library for Python first. Having a PDF library for your preferred language is a good thing.

And it’s natural to then build a cli tool on top of the library they already made.

It’s not open-source, so practically the question is equivalent to “why reinvent the wheel by creating libreoffice when there’s a perfectly good Microsoft office suite out there”

The server component is under GNU GPL: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-license/

In case anyone gets confused, PDFTk Server is just the name for the CLI tool, which hasn't been updated in 10y+ (and annoying to compile due to newer GCC versions removing GCJ). The pdftk provided in various distros (incl. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS) is pdftk-java, a 3rd-party pure Java port of the original tool.

This was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.