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by acefaceZ 468 days ago
It looks like the Free Software Foundation is not standing on the sidelines any longer and have called out Neo4j in the newly filed Amicus Brief filed February 28th, 2025.

Many in the community are only just starting to realize the potential impact of this case on FOSS licensing
2 comments
em-bee 466 days ago
the impact is that if the developer gets to set the rules on how to interpret the license text then there will be a lot of confusion and doubt, because two projects can use the same license and interpret it differently. but while that is potentially a problem it should only affect licenses with ambiguous clauses of which there should not be many in the original GNU licenses, so the primary projects that will be affected are those that modify the GNU licenses and add additional terms.

that modified GNU licenses are problematic should not be surprising. i'd stay away from any project that tries to do that.

the impact is similar to companies calling their products open source even though they don't use an open source license. now we get a company calling their license GNU even though it actually isn't.

beyond that i don't think the outcome of the ruling will matter much.

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happymellon 467 days ago
I'm sorry but I've not been following this.

So Neo4j added additional restrictions to their "GPL" licence, those were removed by a project that redistributed it.

FSF called out Neo4j and Neo4j just relicensed their entire project rather than make it properly GPL, but won't stop hassling the redistribution of the old version. Presumably to stop a GPL version of their older code being out there?

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acefaceZ 466 days ago
I think there is more to the story. Here is an interesting tidbit: The person Neo4j is fighting (Suhy) is the founder of ONgDB and DozerDB - the 2 biggest open source forks of Neo4j. (Possibly the only forks)
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happymellon 465 days ago
So GPL'ed and then unhappy that there are forks?

Madness.

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acefaceZ 465 days ago
Sounds about right. I don’t think their investors were too happy with their ‘open source’ activities.

Neo4j got to where they are on the backs of the open source community, which makes this situation that much more maddening.

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