Is there still true or false open source? Neo4j sued 3 companies for falsely advertising open source in favor

Author | Chu Xingjuan

Last year, Neo4j signed a confidentiality settlement agreement (https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/03/17/neo4j.pdf) with Graph Foundation, which agreed to no longer claim that its ONgDB is a "100% free and open source version" of Neo4j EE (Neo4j Enterprise Edition). Recently, the court also made similar rulings against two other companies that Neo4j sued, PureThink and iGov.

Neo4j sued the three companies because the Graph Foundation, PureThink, and iGov all offered and advertised ONgDB as a "free and open source" version of Neo4j EE.

What happened?

Neo4j is a high-performance NoSQL graph database developed by Neo4j. ONgDB is an open source project operated by the Graph Foundation. ONgDB is derived from the Neo4j EE fork, and its initial version of the source code comes from code before the Neo4j EE code base was completely closed.

In May 2018, Neo4j EE abandoned the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) in favor of a new license. The license, which contains the terms in AGPLv3 and the additional restrictions in the Commons Clause license, was dubbed the "Neo4j Swiss Software License" by the court. This new license prohibits non-paying users from reselling code or providing some support services and is not on the list of open source licenses recognized by OSI. In November 2018, Neo4j Corporation released Neo4j EE version 3.5 under a commercial license only.

Open source forks are common, but the problem with this is that ONgDB and its company have always claimed to be open source Neo4j EE, causing a lot of confusion. ONgDB has been completely redesigned to deprecate all Neo4j-related trademark information.

At present, the organization has discontinued support for ONgDB versions 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6, and released AGPLv3 licensed Neo4j EE version 3.4.0.rc02 branch ONgDB 1.0, users need to comply with the corresponding open source license when commercial, and ONgDB's community version open source license is GPLv3.

PureThink is a software development company founded in 2002 that serves the U.S. government sector. Pursuant to the Award Agreement (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.335295/gov.uscourts.cand.335295.118.0.pdf), in the signed Neo4j EE Purchase Agreement, the parties agreed that the Neo4j Trademarks would only be used for the marketing and resale of commercial licenses for Neo4j EE and its related support services. In exchange for shared revenue from resale licenses.

However, PureThink developed a "government version" of Neo4j with the intention of selling it to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The PureThink release has only the AGPLv3 license. After being asked to view the original, PureThink stated that the IRS could use the open source version of Neo4j EE and paid a consulting fee to PureThink. After neo4j's contract with PureThink expired, PureThink and iGov continued to market the "government version" and touted that ONgDB was a free and open source version of Neo4j EE.

Last May, the judge heard a lawsuit against PureThink, and iGov agreed to Neo4j's partial summary judgment motion (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.335295/gov.uscourts.cand.335295.118.0.pdf) prohibiting the defendant from infringing the plaintiff's Neo4j trademark. ONgDB must not be "used as a free and open source alternative to Neo4j EE..."

The defendants then appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confirmed the lower court's ruling in February. The court held that PureThink's removal of the Commons Clause was unreasonable, so it claimed in the advertisement that the ONgDB software was open source and could be identified as a false advertisement.

The court finally ruled that PureThink was prohibited from promoting, promoting, or referring to any statements that could mislead consumers, such as "ONgDB is a free and open source source code" and "direct replacement of the same version of Neo4j Enterprise Edition."

True and false open source battle

On March 17, OSI issued a document celebrating the court's ruling. In the article (https://opensource.org/blog/court-affirms-its-false-advertising-to-claim-software-is-open-source-when-its-not), the group commented: "If it is clearly not open source, don't say that you are open source", and said that "the court has only confirmed the facts that we already know - Open source is an artistic term that refers to software that is licensed under a specific type of license, and whether that license is approved by OSI is a crucial factor for user adoption. ”

Independent technology lawyer Kyle E. Mitchell (https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/03/17/OSI-Neo4j-PureThink.html) refuted OSI's article, calling it "selfish, misleading, and false, and the court did not rule on what "open source" means. He noted that the most critical signal given by the entire lawsuit was the court's ruling that PureThink had no authority to remove Commons Clause from the file.

Created in early 2018 by a group of open source companies and publicly contributed by FOSSA as an add-on condition to restrict the sale of licensed software, Commons Clause was originally intended to restrict cloud vendors from using open source code to provide commercial services without giving back to the community.

When commons Clause was first released, it caused a strong response in the open source community. Proponents see this as a reasonable and positive evolution on the open source licensing path that allows open source companies to successfully run their businesses while investing in open source projects. Opponents argue that this goes against the spirit of open source. What's more, many companies use only open source software licensed under OSI-approved licenses to ensure that they conform to the open source philosophy. With the addition of Commons Clause, such projects could be at risk.

At the time, OSI, supported by Debian, Mozilla, and The Document Foundation, posted that https://opensource.org/node/966 "open source" would be impossible without a single, standard definition, software development as we know it. Anyone can define open source without trust, without trust there is no community, no collaboration, no innovation.

OSI also said in a recent post, "By adding a different license to the nonfree Commons Clause, the software cannot be described as open source, otherwise it is illegal false advertising." But Mitchell argues that this is a misreading of the verdict.

Mitchell noted that the court considered the original neo4j version to be open source, and after Neo4j added commons Clause, it was still considered "open source" by the court:

In May 2018, the plaintiffs released Neo4j EE version 3.4, which they continued to provide under an open source license; however, they replaced the AGPL with a stricter license, which included the terms in AGPLv3 and additional restrictions provided by the Commons Clause.

Only when Neo4j obtained an exclusive commercial license, the court held that this marked the end of the open source release:

In November 2018, the plaintiffs released Neo4j EE version 3.5 only under a commercial license. Since then, the plaintiffs no longer offer Neo4j EE on an open source basis.

"The cause of the problem was the cancellation of the Commons Clause, and lawyers on both sides argued about it." Mitchell said.

In fact, Redis Labs briefly used the Commons Clause, but abandoned it because of the question of whether the software under that clause was open source.

In August 2018, Redis Labs announced its decision to add commons Clause as an add-on to its free and open source license for certain add-on modules. The clause makes the source code usable, but consumers cannot "sell" modules, including making them available as commercial services.

But six months later, Redis Labs announced that it was abandoning the Commons Clause in favor of a new available source license, RSAL. "It (Commons Clause) doesn't work. People have been confused about whether these modules are open source. They are not open source. Manish Gupta, chief marketing officer at Redis Labs, explains.

Who defines "open source"?

"I love free software, although it's not clear what kind of freedom it is." So what is open source and who defines open source?

Although OSI is recognized as the "official" organization of open source, there are also developers who do not believe that open source should be defined by OSI. "I don't think you, the Open Source Initiative (OSI), or anyone else can define true open source alone." Developer Martin Tournoij (https://www.arp242.net/open-source.html #fn:1) once said in his personal blog, "I'm not against the open source definition (OSD), but judging all use of open source in terms of it won't work." Correcting millions of people 'using open source wrong' isn't a good strategy for accomplishing anything meaningful — it doesn't promote the use of open source. ”

"There is considerable disagreement between different groups about 'what constitutes open source', so it seems crazy to me to claim that a single party can define and arbitrate open source without premise." One developer said, "Or you've forgotten the differences between yourself and the community, like, 'If you don't stand with us, you're against open source.'" In any case, I'm not going to be given OSI as a compass. Not sure who elected them to be the king of open source. ”

In addition, some developers point out that some companies refer to their products as "open source" when promoted simply because their source code is on GitHub, even if the licenses are as restrictive as any proprietary license.

"Open source can be fraudulent if misused." Bruce Perens, one of the initiators of open source software, commented. Nowadays, open source has become the standard for the development of technology companies, but it has also come with some false open source publicity. There is still a long way to go to build a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem.