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.

Some of the code in EPPlus was at this point 10 years old and needed refactoring/redesign and better test coverage. At the same time new versions of Excel, .NET Framework/Standard/Core was introduced and more work needed just to keep up with that.

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

By the end of 2018, we reached a point where we had to decide what to do with the project.

EPPlus Software

We founded EPPlus Software to be able to work full time with EPPlus and this has led to a much better product that will continue to improve over time

In early 2020 we released EPPlus 5, the first major version under the new license model - followed by EPPlus 6 in April 2022 and EPPlus 7 in October 2023. The new versions is the result of a process where we have worked with lawyers to ensure that we legally can change the license. But we have also implemented a lot of new features, fixed many issues from EPPlus 4 and improved the code from previous versions.

What happens with EPPlus 4?

EPPlus 4 is still (and will always be) licensed under LGPL. You can of course continue to use EPPlus 4 and previous versions and you can still install them via Nuget (these versions are marked as deprecated and are no longer maintained by us).

                    
 PM> Install-Package EPPlus -Version 4.5.3.3 
                    
                

The code for EPPlus 4 will stay on Jan Källmans github repo and can be forked/used according to the LGPL license.

Our focus, however, will be on version 5 and up going forward.

The new license model

EPPlus 5 and up is licensed under the Polyform Noncommercial 1.0.0 license. Read more about it here.

Future way of working

We want to keep the community driven way of working. Unlike other commercial alternatives, our code will still be fully available and open. The code for EPPlus 5/6/7, the new sample projects and wiki has moved to EPPlus Software’s github account.

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