From LGPL to Polyform Noncommercial

From version 5, we have changed the license from LGPL to Polyform Noncommercial 1.0.0 - a license that permits noncommercial use only. In combination with the Polyform Noncommercial license we sell licenses for customers who use EPPlus in a commercial business. Since EPPlus has been around for a while, you might wonder why we have decided to do this change.

The story behind EPPlus

We are two brothers - Jan Källman and Mats Alm - based in Stockholm, Sweden. Jan started EPPlus on Codeplex back in 2009 for the simple reason that he needed a spreadsheet library in a project he was working on and there was not really anything available at the time with enough performance and functionality. After some time Mats joined and we started to build it together, mostly for fun.

We have never marketed EPPlus, but it started to spread across the .NET community anyway. Somewhere around 2014 it was the most downloaded spreadsheet package on Nuget. During 2019 it had over 6,5 million downloads and was among the top 100 most downloaded packages, not bad for a hobby project!

Challenges

All our work with the library had to be done on our spare time (weekends, holidays, evenings/nights) and for various reasons we have had less time to spend on it the last years. At the same time the usage of EPPlus increased rapidly and, after we moved to github, the number of issues and pull requests increased rapidly as well. Pull requests are great, they can however be a bit tricky to handle since parts of the library has poor test coverage and it is not easy for someone who is not fully familiar with the code to understand all side effects that it might cause. Issues/questions from users started to pile up and it was difficult to know even where to start having only a few hours now and then.

EPPlus 中的一些代码当时已有 10 年历史，需要重构/重新设计并加强测试覆盖。与此同时，推出了新版本的 Excel、.NET Framework/Standard/Core，需要更多工作才能跟上。

This was not a good situation neither for us nor the users of EPPlus.

到2018年底，我们到了必须决定如何处理这个项目的阶段。

EPPlus 软件

我们创立EPPlus Software是为了能够全职使用EPPlus，这带来了更好的产品，并且会随着时间不断改进

2020年初，我们发布了EPPlus 5，这是新许可模式下的第一个主要版本——随后是2022年4月的EPPlus 6和2023年10月的EPPlus 7。这些新版本是我们与律师合作确保合法更改许可过程的结果。同时，我们也 实现了许多新功能， 修复了EPPlus 4的许多问题 ，并 改进了之前 版本的代码。

EPPlus 4 会发生什么？

EPPlus 4 仍然（并且永远都会）以 LGPL 授权。当然，你还可以继续使用 EPPlus 4 及更早版本，也可以通过 Nuget 安装它们（这些版本已被标记为弃用，我们不再维护）。

                    
 PM> Install-Package EPPlus -Version 4.5.3.3 
                    
                

EPPlus 4 的代码将保留在 GitHub 仓库Jan Källmans并可根据 LGPL 许可证进行分支/使用。

不过，我们的重点将放在第5版及以后版本。

新的许可模式

EPPlus 5及以上版本采用Polyform非商业1.0.0许可证授权。 点击此处了解更多。

未来的工作方式

我们希望保持社区驱动的工作方式。与其他商业替代方案不同，我们的代码仍将完全开放和开放。EPPlus 5/6/7 的代码、新的示例项目和维基已迁移到 EPPlus Software 的 GitHub 账户。

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