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I want to use smile but their license is prohibiting the use of it at my company. I understand the project authors' intentions to promote contributions to the project, but the requirements to get commercial license is a deal breaker for many.

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I suspect the (L)GPL is a big part of why Java has more-or-less completely ceded the data space to Python. Corporate policy makes it painful for me to take a dependency on GPL (including LGPL), too, and that makes building and maintaining data applications in Java an absolute minefield, because so many projects are copyleft. Even the packages that are Apache, MIT or BSD licensed often require you to plug in netlib-java (LGPL) if you want decent performance.

It's encouraging to see a project like Tribuo come along, but it also feels like too little, too late. I'm already well underway on jumping ship and migrating to Python, and have yet to encounter any particular reason why I should look back.

I don't think netlib-java is LGPL. Where does it say that it is?

Sorry, I was misremembering the problem. It's not netlib-java that is LGPL. It's some of the native math libraries that plug into netlib-java.

> [...] but the requirements to get commercial license is a deal breaker for many.

I don't understand why this has become the norm. Would your company not use smile to, presumably, make money?

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