Workbook 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.

[murb]

Thanks for noting, I am aware of the 'issue' (see the readme file). The 'problem' is that axlsx doesn't read the old-style .xls files which are still around. The purpose of this gem is to have a simple gem that kind of abstracts the different filetypes (and api's provided by the different gem) away to a API that is familiar to us all, namely Array/Hash-like. I wouldn't mind dropping .xls-writing functionality, even though I have used that to quite some extend in the past, but I would like to maintain some compatibility with the old Excel file format for reading (at least for reading the values). Any suggestions are welcome, and hence I'll leave this issue open.

From a more practical point of view: In case you're evaluating this gem for commercial purposes: IANAL, but when your users aren't using the xls-reading/writing you're not infecting them. And in case you're building a web-app, you might read upon the difference between GPLv3 and _A_GPLv3.

[murb]

I like what roo has done, moving the spreadsheet dependency in another gem. Might move into that direction as well.