NEO4J OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
NEO4J OPEN SOURCE TRIAL
NEO4J OPEN SOURCE FREE

The foundation of Neo4j’s graph data platform is its NoSQL native graph database, which connects data as it is stored.

Criminal and Intelligence Investigations.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Using this relationships-first approach, applications built with Neo4j tackle connected data challenges such as: Department of Defense (DoD) and intelligence and civilian agencies reveal and predict how people, processes and systems are interrelated.

As the world’s most widely deployed graph data platform, we help the U.S. We’ve covered that in our next post.Neo4j is the leader in graph technology. Even though the AGPL has a clause specifically allowing downstream recipients to remove “further restrictions” like the Commons Clause, the court stopped the defendant from doing just that. There’s another interesting aspect to this case.

NEO4J OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

But adding the non-free Commons Clause created a different license such that the software could not be characterized as “open source” and doing so in these circumstances was unlawful false advertising.

Had the defendants’ desire to license its software as AGPLv3-only been permissible, its claims of “100% open source” wouldn’t have been false and there would have been no false advertising. The court only confirmed what we already know – that “open source” is a term of art for software that has been licensed under a specific type of license, and whether a license is an OSI-approved license is a critically important factor in user adoption of the software. Thus, the Court finds that Defendants’ statements suggesting that customers could obtain a ‘free and open source drop in replacement’ for Neo4j EE were material.”

NEO4J OPEN SOURCE FREE

This deception was also material: “Because Defendants misrepresented ONgDB as a free version of Neo4j EE licensed under the APGLv3, there is no doubt that this price differential (free versus paid) was likely to influence customers’ purchasing decisions.

NEO4J OPEN SOURCE TRIAL

The trial court held that characterizing software that was under the Commons Clause as “free and open source” was false. However, the court held that it was improper for the defendants to remove the Commons Clause, and therefore the defendants’ claims in advertising that its ONgDB software was open source was false advertising.įor a false advertising claim, there must be a false statement in commercial advertising and the statement must be deceptive in a material way. There was also no allegation that Neo4j had claimed that its software under the AGPLv3 + Commons Clause was open source. The parties didn’t dispute that the use of the Commons Clause makes a license non-free. They advertised ONgDB as “free and open source,” “100% free and open,” and “100% open source.” The defendants forked the software, renamed it “Open Native Graph Database” (ONgDB), and started distributing their version as AGPLv3-only licensed. This “Swedish license” was simply the combination of the Affero General Public License with an additional restriction known as the Commons Clause. had been through several releases of its software and several license choices along the way, ending with what the court called “the Sweden Software License,” because the licensor was a Swedish subsidiary of the plaintiff. The facts, as described by the trial court, are that Neo4j, Inc. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we’ve always known: that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open source license.

Neo4j open source