What is the status of this project? Is it still active?

[TechSavvySam]

I'd like to respectfully address the elephant in the room here. I'm sure a lot of people have this question and for some reason it has not been asked here or the question has been deleted.

From my perspective it appears that this project is stalled. I say this because:

1. The last new release was 7 months ago
2. There are 370 open issues
3. Most importantly, there are 70 open pull requests. I assume these are where users have taken the effort to track down and fix an issue, yet those requests are just languishing.

My request for me and the community of users is:

1. Let us know what's going on
2. Inform us of your plan moving forward
3. Ask for help--I suspect this is tough for you, as it is for many of us here.

I have a show-stopper bug with a fix for it but I'm hesitant to do a pull request if it is just going to go unanswered. So I've made a copy of the whole project with my ONE little fix to include in my project.

Regards,
Sam

[xin-lai]

If the author cannot support it, should we support it together?

[PrzemyslawKlys]

@xin-lai how do you propose to do that? Without the author, there's no way to update it here. Someone trusted would need to fork it and everyone should move to the fork if author doesn't want to continue.

[TechSavvySam]

When I get done with the urgent stuff I'm working on now, I'm going to investigate using Open XML SDK. If that works well, then I think it kind of signals the oncoming demise of any open source solutions to manipulate XLSX files.

IMO, once Microsoft provides an open source solution, newly built applications will gravitate toward that solution and interest in other solutions drops.

[mason-mcglothlin]

@TechSavvySam In my experience, Open XML SDK was quite a bit more complicated than EPPlus. Plus, we have code that depends on EPPlus.

I share your concerns about this being a dead project. I tried to contribute a fix in June last year (#475) but haven't heard anything about when it's going to get released. My company ended up forking the code and creating our own NuGet package on our private server, but that's obviously not an ideal scenario.

[mason-mcglothlin]

Jan Källman hasn't shown any GitHub activity since 2018. I hope he's doing well! But if he no longer has the time to contribute to this project, perhaps he should begin searching for someone else to take over so that we don't have to go through the pain of forking the project and letting everyone know the new location.

[TechSavvySam]

Agree--I hope Jan is OK as well. That was my first concern. My hope is Jan just got busy making money and hasn't had time to devote to the project.

[xin-lai]

I hope so.
EPPlus is very good,I wrote a simpler import and export library based on it。https://github.com/dotnetcore/Magicodes.IE

[mason-mcglothlin]

Jan shows activity on LinkedIn within the past 5 months. I've sent him a message asking him to come comment on this issue.

[PrzemyslawKlys]

So did I, so let's not message him everyone now :-)

[mason-mcglothlin]

I heard back from Jan on LinkedIn. He indicated that he plans to provide some information on this thread within a few hours. Sounds like some things around here will change, and it sounds like it may be for the better.

[JanKallman]

Sorry for my absence. We have been working hard with the new version EPPlus 5.0 that will be announced soon.

To give you the background:

Over the last years it has become obvious to Mats and me that we can not continue to maintain EPPlus as a hobby/sparetime project. About a year ago we decided to start a company, EPPlus Software, to enble us to work full time with EPPlus. We have therefore taken the codebase through an IP review to ensure that the code is the intellectual property of our company. This IP review is now completed.

In the new version the license will change from LGPL to a dual license model (one paid commercial license with support included and one for noncommercial use which will be free). The refactored source code for the new version will move to a new github repo and future development will still be done publicly with the community under the new license model.

EPPlus 5 will come with some new features, which includes Themes, Filters, support for async/await on io-operations and a lot of improvements for chart styling (Office 2016 styling) and more. The sample project has been redesigned and extended.

During the coming weeks we will launch a website where commercial licenses can be purchased and publish EPPlus 5-beta on Nuget. When this happens we will also release further details regarding pricing, license terms for the commercial license, etc.

[TechSavvySam]

Many thanks for the update Jan!

[rlightner]

Wow, that went from "Hey this project is dead, and has a lot of outstanding bugs" to "We're gonna switch up the licensing model and start charging." super quick.

How about you merge the pull requests before the switch?

[fuzzzerd]

Wow, that went from "Hey this project is dead, and has a lot of outstanding bugs" to "We're gonna switch up the licensing model and start charging." super quick.

I have to agree! There have been other projects that have done similar, and while I understand the maintainers desire to make money off their work, as a user it still leaves a sour taste when a project uses an open source license to gain traction and then switch to a paid model.

How about you merge the pull requests before the switch?

In my opinion, that would certainly go a long way toward alleviating some of my angst with the license switch.

[JanKallman]

Wow, that went from "Hey this project is dead, and has a lot of outstanding bugs" to "We're gonna switch up the licensing model and start charging." super quick.
How about you merge the pull requests before the switch?

We can't merge any pull request into the new version, as the pull request are commited into the LGPL version. Merging all pull requests into EPPlus 4.5.3.2 AND validate that they work properly is a massiv task and nothing that we will do. You can of course do it yourself. EPPlus version 4.5.3.2 is still LGPL and can be forked and maintained by anyone who is up to the challange.
I have worked with EPPlus for more than 10 years without funding, and it has now become unsustaiable for me. Rather than letting this project stall, we move it into a product that can be financed in a sustainable way and live on.