https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/adverse_appeals_court...

There will be case law after appeal - FSF seems too timid to sue Neo4j (which they could do) and save decades of work.

maybe I misunderstood what you were saying…

https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-submits-amicus-brief-in-neo4j-v...

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/jan/13/neo4j-amicus/

Neo4j quietly slipped the Commons Clause into what looked like a standard AGPL license, complete with the FSF copyright and preamble, until a single person called them out.

Instead of owning up, Neo4j spent nearly a decade and tens of millions trying to crush one person. Not the best business minds over there…

Anyway - it sounds like Liquibase didn’t go to that extreme and fixed their messaging as soon as the community educated them.

Calling it Infinigraph is a much better marketing move than saying “We finally fixed our clustering implementation to properly shard and scale”.

Have they finally managed to fix the scalability issues?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133522

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

I would avoid Neo4j open source offerings (community edition, etc) like the plague until their court case is over. They are fighting to be able to use their interpretation of what GPL terms means - and from their past behavior - it’s probably going to be bad news for anyone who adopted it because it was open source.

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

The case centers on who has the authority to interpret the terms of an open-source license:

1.The software developers who adopt licenses like GPLv3, MIT, or Apache 2.0 for their projects OR 2. The original authors of those licenses (FSF, Apache Foundation, etc)

If the appeal fails to overturn the flawed lower court ruling, it will set a precedent allowing legal cases to focus on how software developers themselves interpret the terms of licenses like GPLv3, MIT,Apache 2.0, etc. This is precisely what happened with Neo4j.

This issue is significant enough that two of the leading open-source foundations submitted amicus briefs in the case.

I think Neo4j knows it is wrong after this latest Amicus and they have the power to stop this in its tracks by simply settling the case before the ninth circuit makes a ruling which will be precedent.

Pretty crazy situation!

Adobe and Microsoft must love that.

1.The software developers who adopt licenses like GPLv3, MIT, or Apache 2.0 for their projects

OR

2. The original authors of those licenses (FSF, Apache Foundation, etc)

If the appeal fails to overturn the flawed lower court ruling, it will set a precedent allowing legal cases to focus on how software developers themselves interpret the terms of licenses like GPLv3, MIT,Apache 2.0, etc.

This is precisely what happened with Neo4j.

This issue is significant enough that two of the leading open-source foundations submitted amicus briefs in the case.

I think Neo4j knows it is wrong after this latest Amicus and they have the power to stop this in its tracks by simply settling the case before the ninth circuit makes a ruling which will be precedent.

Pretty crazy situation!

Many in the community are only just starting to realize the potential impact of this case on FOSS licensing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249342

Points: 26

# Comments: 7

If the Ninth Circuit upholds the lower court’s ruling, it won’t just threaten the GPL, it could undermine all open-source licenses, undoing years of work to protect software freedom.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200956

Points: 9

# Comments: 1