

Neo4j Graph Database 1.0 released - nawroth
http://news.neo4j.org/2010/02/neo4j-10-released.html

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mark_l_watson
Neo4J is a great tool - I have used it with the Ruby wrappers.

A little off topic but: I think that the AGPL (which is used for Neo4J) is a
good license but I wish that dual licensed projects would be a bit more up
front on what the cost of the commercial waiver is for various use scenarios.
For me the issue is that I would like to know up front how much 'commercial'
use would cost if I would happen to have a customer who could not live with
AGPL license terms.

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rabidsnail
From the AGPL:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to
link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the
GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the
resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part
which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain
governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License."

So, if you write a wrapper licensed as gplv3 (say, a set of Clojure bindings),
distribute the source for that and for neo4j, and load the wrapper (a gplv3
licensed work) into your program, the network interaction cluse of the agpl
should not trigger, no?

Disclaimer: IANAL

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zmmmmm
Your interpretation sounds valid but I'm highly sceptical since it appears to
be a loophole that undoes the entire purpose of the AGPL. You have to be
careful about being right in technical terms but wrong in substance - as in
the classic exchange on GPL from Stallman:

[http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...](http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-
CLISP-is-under-GPL)

The kicker being (Stallman's words):

"What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such
schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a
judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is
labeled"

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rabidsnail
I thought the purpose of the agpl was to stop free riders from making modified
versions of free software without contributing their changes back. In that
case, its purpose is not defeated since you'd be required to publish any
changes you made to neo4j.

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warfangle
I found this presentation from Emil (Jan 19, 2010) much more informative than
the podcast linked to from the release:

[http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/342947902/presentation-
graph...](http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/342947902/presentation-graphs-
neo4j-teh-awesome)

Edit:

What's really intriguing is what they're going to roll out with v2.0 - instead
of basic, customer-written sharding algos, they're going to supply automatic
sharding based on graph clustering algos.

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minalecs
what are the main differences in the open source version and the commercial
version other than not being able to distribute, and the customer support they
offer.. do they place limitations on nodes between the two versions ?

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mpviolet
There's no difference in limitations on nodes between the community version
and the commercial version.

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ohashi
Just want to say congrats to Emil and his team :)

