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roo-rb / roo-xls

Roo::Xls add support for legacy Excel file standards to Roo.
MIT License
82 stars 82 forks source link

Licensing land-mine. #17

Closed MrJoy closed 8 years ago

MrJoy commented 8 years ago

The author of the spreadsheet gem seems to have a fairly bizarre interpretation of the GPLv3, and has been unwilling to clarify that interpretation. His interpretation looks to me like he has confused the GPLv3 with the GNU AGPL.

You may wish to note in the README that while the license is presented as being GPLv3 that the author seems to interpret it more like the GNU AGPL and that they should plan accordingly as they will (apparently) need a commercial license if they wish to run a public-facing service using this code.

stevendaniels commented 8 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this. The licensing issue for spreadsheet is terribly complex.

spreadsheet gem is based on spreadsheet-excel which uses the Ruby License. At the time spreadsheet was written, the Ruby License allowed "covered software to be distributed under the terms of the GPL instead of those of the Ruby License itself."

I agree his interpretation does not seem to reflect the GPLv3, but I offer no opinion on how others should use the spreadsheet gem.

Frankly, I would love to write an MIT-licensed gem for reading XLS files--if someone was paying me to do so (via kickstarter or other means).

I'd happily add request a PR updating the README language.

MrJoy commented 8 years ago

PR #18 submitted.

It does take a stance on how to proceed that would show an abundance of caution for the matter, by taking the most conservative approach possible here. Users are of course free to take a chance (with or without proper counsel) on how a court would handle the ambiguity but this approach should be the safest option short of "don't use spreadsheet (and by extension, roo-xls)."

stevendaniels commented 8 years ago

Modified your language and created this commit.

https://github.com/roo-rb/roo-xls/commit/6449b5de121420cb8981df876acf984b547d7703

Thanks for your help!

jetaggart commented 8 years ago

I appreciate the discussion. After looking through the spreadsheet gem license, we've decided that it's way to risky to depend on that in any way. We've started building our own xls parser. Any help would be appreciated. Obviously, it's still rough, but we've got basic spreadsheets parsed. Just wanted to throw this out there in case someone was thinking of undertaking this, so there would not be duplicate effort.

The repo is here: https://github.com/p2bi/read_xls

If you'd like to help I'd be happy to orient you in the code.