Sheets depends on GPLv3 code

[brodock]

As this gem has a dependency on "spreadsheets" which is GPLv3, it contaminates your code with the same license.

I suggest that you change your excel generator to : https://github.com/randym/axlsx which is MIT licensed.

[bspaulding]

Yikes! Good catch. It's not obvious from the documentation that the axlsx gem supports ye-olde xls format. Am I just missing it? That's what we're using spreadsheets for.

[brodock]

Sorry, I don't need to generate/support "binary" .xls files, for my use case, XML based versions like Excel 2002 are enough, which makes things easy.

Also unless you do have a commercial license to use spreadsheets, you can't use it in a closed source project... read their recent statement on their website: http://spreadsheet.ch/2014/10/24/using-ruby-spreadsheet-on-heroku-with-dynos/

If you intend to use The Ruby Spreadsheet on Heroku, and your source code is closed source then 0-4 2X dynos at 100% CPU load are considered as one physical CPU (1 PX). In other words, this means that if your Software runs on Heroku, is not OpenSource and uses The Ruby Spreadsheet gem you will have to buy a NON-OpenSource Commercial License that allows you to use The Ruby Spreadsheet together with your closed-source code.

Licensing based on physical CPUs remembers me of Oracle exploitation scheme...

So, If dropping support to spreadsheets isn't an option for you, could you consider a PR that enables .xls only when spreadsheets is present but make it optional on gemspec?

I also would like to use same mechanism for axlsx

[bspaulding]

Yea, that's gross. I'd definitely like to replace spreadsheets with a different implementation.

I was thinking the same thing regarding breaking the parser into a separate, optional gem. I would definitely be cool with that PR.