Whatever Stallman’s vision was - It seems he didn’t care enough to fight for it when sh@# hit the fan with Neo4j. If you don’t know what I am talking about check out link below.
At least Liquibase isn’t masquerading under a well known open source license, unlike Neo4j’s infamous AGPL bait-and-switch.
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.
Thank you. I did some more in depth research and it sounds like they just fixed their clustering mechanism to actually do some sharding like elasticsearch and TigerGraph.
Calling it Infinigraph is a much better marketing move than saying “We finally fixed our clustering implementation to properly shard and scale”.
Neo4j performance is horrendous unless you have huge amounts of memory. I would wager that anyone who has used Neo4j for anything related to graphrag or used its vector features knows it’s not a great solution. Anyone can verify this quite easily.
Neo4j has been trying to scare agencies into paying for enterprise licenses. I bet many more are going to dump them moving forward because of this behavior and the fact that the costs don’t really support any meaningful ROI except for edge cases which are far and few between.
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.
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.
If you are familiar with pacer or ACMS - it is an old antiquated system. You can’t submit PDFs for example generated from anything other than Adobe Acrobat or exported from Microsoft word.
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)
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.
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
The open-source community is finally realizing that Neo4j v. PureThink could set a dangerous legal precedent, allowing companies to impose new restrictions on open-source licenses.
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.
The danger here isn’t just about AGPLv3 or even GPLv3, it’s about setting a legal precedent that could be used to undermine all open-source licenses, including permissive ones like MIT and Apache.
GPLv3 will be decimated if the ruling is upheld. You could never trust that a GPLv3 licensed project could not pull a bait and switch like Neo4j in the future.
The lower court’s ruling effectively says that a licensor can override open-source freedoms by tacking on new restrictions, even when using a license that explicitly prohibits them.
If upheld, this decision could be cited in future cases to argue that a licensor’s intent matters more than the actual terms of the license, opening the door for companies to attach proprietary restrictions to open-source projects without consequence.
In other words, the entire legal framework that ensures open-source licenses are binding and enforceable is at risk, making it easier to impose restrictions after distribution—something previously considered legally untenable.
This isn’t just about “virality” in GPLv3, it’s about whether any open-source license can still be trusted to mean what it says.
Thanks for looking out for the community!! The community needs more organizations like yours - who will stand up to this type of behavior.
Neo4j’s actions are very disappointing.
It’s hard to ignore that this litigation is aimed at someone who also happens to be the founder of the two largest free and open-source Neo4j forks, ONGDB and DOZERDB.
Makes you wonder if this litigation is really about stifling open-source competition.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/adverse_appeals_court...