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IANAL, but it seems to me that the court has only decided that if you fork software, and break it's license by removing clauses that aren't permitted to be remo

IANAL, but it seems to me that the court has only decided that if you fork software, and break it's license by removing clauses that aren't permitted to be removed (think removing one of the 3 clauses in a 3-clause BSD license), then you're distributing the software under a license that is a lie, and thus invalid, and thus not "open-source". Could this be used as precedent if you release software and claim that it's open-source, but don't provide full source or even any source at all? Probably not IMHO.

teilo 5y ago
Yes, this is what I think is going on here. It's a bit more complicated though. In the case of AGPL, you have an original open source release A that is forked to create B, and restrictions are added to the license of B. The original license of A permits those restrictions to be removed by someone who forks B into C. C is under no obligation to abide by those additional restrictions added by B. But for that rule to apply in this case, the original code must have been licensed without such restrictions. If the original code, as in the case of Neo4j EE, was licensed under AGPL+Commons Clause, then that combination IS the original license. Downstream forks cannot remove that Commons Clause restriction and claim that the fork is "Free," because the original license is still in force, restrictions and all.
thayne 5y ago
> Could this be used as precedent if you release software and claim that it's open-source, but don't provide full source or even any source at all? Probably not IMHO. That would be unfortunate, because there are companies that claim their products are "open source" even though they clearly aren't. For example pritunl markets their product as open source on their website, but while the source code is available on github, it is licensed with a proprietary license that doesn't let you do basically anything with that source code.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Yea there are many many companies that do this. Maybe we need a "hall of shame" to call them out. Maybe we can give out "Biggest Open Source Liar" awards.

teilo 5y ago

Yes, this is what I think is going on here. It's a bit more complicated though. In the case of AGPL, you have an original open source release A that is forked to create B, and restrictions are added to the license of B. The original license of A permits those restrictions to be removed by someone who forks B into C. C is under no obligation to abide by those additional restrictions added by B. But for that rule to apply in this case, the original code must have been licensed without such restrictions. If the original code, as in the case of Neo4j EE, was licensed under AGPL+Commons Clause, then that combination IS the original license. Downstream forks cannot remove that Commons Clause restriction and claim that the fork is "Free," because the original license is still in force, restrictions and all.

thayne 5y ago

> Could this be used as precedent if you release software and claim that it's open-source, but don't provide full source or even any source at all? Probably not IMHO. That would be unfortunate, because there are companies that claim their products are "open source" even though they clearly aren't. For example pritunl markets their product as open source on their website, but while the source code is available on github, it is licensed with a proprietary license that doesn't let you do basically anything with that source code.

phendrenad2 5y ago
Yea there are many many companies that do this. Maybe we need a "hall of shame" to call them out. Maybe we can give out "Biggest Open Source Liar" awards.