LGPL license makes it impossible to use uadetector in a Apache project

[sergehuber]

Hello,

We are having an issue using uadetector in an Apache project, because it uses a class that has a LGPL license. This type of license is not allowed in an official Apache project.

I saw that we the AlphanumComparator LGPL class is used in the VersionNumber.compareTo method, and I was wondering if it was really uses because when debugging on a parsing of a user agent string it doesn't seem to be called. If that is the case and this is dead code maybe just removing it could be a way to fix this ?

Otherwise I did a little research and it seems they have alternatives here :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1262239/natural-sort-order-string-comparison-in-java-is-one-built-in

Notably this one : https://github.com/paour/natorder that seems to have an acceptable license (based on zlib). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License and https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html

Fixing this problem would be a great help for us, and highly appreciated.

[hyandell]

Noting that CC-BY-SA is also going to affect the licensing of uadetector.

If of value, I have this implementation under BSD:

https://github.com/hen/osjava/blob/master/genjava/gj-core/src/java/com/generationjava/compare/NumericStringComparator.java

Old code that didn't make it into Apache Commons. I'm happy to relicense that Apache-2.0 for this project. Or there is the zlib code that Serge pointed to.