Organization Open Source Initiative (OSI), tested by licenses for compliance with Open Source criteria, Posted Demoloration of the court decision in the case against Purethink, associated with NEO4J Inc. intellectual property violation.
Recall that Purethink has created a fork of the project neo4j , which was originally supplied under the AGPLV3 license, but then divided into a free community-edit and commercial version of Neo4 EE. For the commercial version, additional conditions have been added to the AGPL text “ Commons Clause “, limiting the use in cloud services. Since in Text AGPLV3 license is a clause that allows you to remove additional restrictions that infer the rights provided by AGPL licensed, Purethink has created its own fork ongdb based on the NEO4 EE product code, but began to distribute it under a regular AGPL license and advertised it as a fully outdoor option
Neo4 EE.
The discussion recognized the unlawful removal of additional conditions added by NEO4J INC to the AGPL license text, due to the fact that the change in the text of the license was made by the owner of property rights to code and its action in essence are the transfer of the project to a fundamentally new proprietary license created on Based AGPL.
Court agreed with the opinion of the plaintiff that the AGPL item regarding the possibility of removing additional conditions is applicable only to the licensor, and the user is a licensee that should comply with paragraphs 7 and 10 prohibiting the licensee to introduce additional restrictions, but not prohibiting it to make a licensor. Another interpretation of these items would go into incision with the basic principles of copyright, which gives the authors the exclusive right to licensing their product on its choice.
With the authors of the AGPL license, the item allows you to remove additional limitations, Positioned (see Note 73 ) First of all, as a measure to counteract abuse Owners of rights to code, such as adding additional requirements with a ban on commercial use.
But the court did not agree with such a position and relying on the results of the previously considered “Neo4j Inc against Graph Foundation”, decided that the AGPL item was present to counteract the imposition of additional restrictions apply to the actions of users (licensees), and property owners On the code (licensees) are free to produce irritating. At the same time, as before, you can change the license only to a new code, and already previously open under AGPL old code option remains available under the previous license. Those. The defendant could develop under Clean AGPL fork code in a state to change the license by the author, but to base the fork on a new code with a modified license, considering it as a code under clean Agpl, unacceptable.