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by zmmmmm 5961 days ago
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"

1 comments

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.