Possible license problem

[priyadi]

Hi, I use MimeMap in my project rekalogika/file-metadata and just noticed a possible licensing violation.

MimeMap uses MIME types database from Freedesktop's shared-mime-info. However, that project is licensed under GPL, therefore any derivation must be licensed under GPL, including this project.

My suggestion: Switch to Apache Tika's MIME database, and keep the LGPL license. Spin off the shared-mime-info-related code to an optional separate project, licensed under GPL. Make the main project use the optional database if it is installed (using class_exists checks).

As a side note, Rails also did something similar a couple of years ago.