US Court of Appeal left in strength Decision, earlier Adopted District Court in Affairs against Purethink associated with violation of trademark and intellectual property NEO4J Inc. The claim concerns the transferring and spread of the clone of the DBMS NEO4J.
Initially, the DBMS neo4j developed as an open project supplied under the AGPLV3 license. Over time, the product was divided into a free communicability and commercial version of NEO4 EE, which continued to be supplied under the AGPL license. Multiple issues back NEO4J Inc changed the delivery conditions and made changes to the AGPL text for the NEO4 EE product, installing additional conditions “ Commons Clause “limiting application in cloud services. Adding the conditions “Commons Clause” transported the product in the category of proprietary software.
in Text AGPLV3 licenses There is an item prohibiting if the code is mentioned using AGPL to impose additional restrictions Supplied by the license provided by the license, and in the case of adding additional restrictions to the text of the license allowing you to use software under the original license, deleting added restrictions. Purethink benefited from this feature and based on the NEO4 EE product code, translated into a modified AGPL license, started the development of the forka ongdb (Open Native Graph Database ) supplied under the Clean license AGPLV3 and positioned as a free and fully open option
Neo4 EE.
The court fell on the side of the developers of Neo4j and the score of Purethink is invalid, and statements about the fully open character of their product is false. In the court decision, two important Approval:
- Despite the presence of an additional restrictions in the AGPL text, the court invalid the conduct of such manipulations.
- The court carried an expression “Open Source” not to general terms, and to objects of action of a certain type of licenses that meet the criteria defined by Open Source Initiative (OSI). For example, the use of the phrase “100% Open Source” for products under a clean license AgPlv3 cannot be considered false advertisements , but the use of such an expression for The product under a modified license AGPLV3 allows you to read the respondent actions as the distribution of illegal false advertising.