[rabidsnail]

From the AGPL:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License."

So, if you write a wrapper licensed as gplv3 (say, a set of Clojure bindings), distribute the source for that and for neo4j, and load the wrapper (a gplv3 licensed work) into your program, the network interaction cluse of the agpl should not trigger, no?

Disclaimer: IANAL

[zmmmmm]

Your interpretation sounds valid but I'm highly sceptical since it appears to be a loophole that undoes the entire purpose of the AGPL. You have to be careful about being right in technical terms but wrong in substance - as in the classic exchange on GPL from Stallman:

http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...

The kicker being (Stallman's words):

"What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled"

[rabidsnail]

I thought the purpose of the agpl was to stop free riders from making modified versions of free software without contributing their changes back. In that case, its purpose is not defeated since you'd be required to publish any changes you made to neo4j.