On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Richard Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So, I have to admit this is the first time I'd heard of Neo4J and it > seems really cool. Looking on the site, however, I noticed it is > duel-licensed under a commercial license and the AGPL. My concern is > that, the AGPL and the ASLv2 that Qi4j is licensed under are > incompatible, aren't they? I'm not a lawyer and don't claim to have any > solid understanding of all the terms in the licenses, but doesn't that > mean that this cannot be hosted as part of the Qi4j project?
The original author has the rights to license any part of the work, any way he/she/it wants. So, having the Qi4j-Neo4j bridge in our project is not a legal problem per se. BUT, and this is a HUGE, PAIN in the BUTT; The downstream user that downloads Neo4J and makes it available to some user, either embedded in the application or by providing a networked service, will have to either; a. Abide by the AGPL, which requires at least GPL of derived work, OR b. Get the commercial license. The only time you can use Neo4J together with a closed-source app, without the commercial license, is that the work is an embedded application, and the end-user is informed that "Download Neo4J, do 1,2,3, and voila", i.e. the end-user enable everything himself. Impractical, but possible. In reality, this is not much different from the GigaSpaces EntityStore, although GigaSpaces approach to 'commercial lock-in' is slightly different, where the community edition is not clusterable. So, to the community; 1. Qi4j is not going to help promote commercial products at all. Kick everything out that is not Apache/BSD/MIT licensed. 2. Qi4j allows non-Apache/BSD/MIT licensed extensions, libraries, work to be referenced on the web site, but not hosted in the source repository. So, by only sticking to the code in Qi4j repository I don't risk some unwanted lock-in. 3. Qi4j follows the Apache Software Foundation rules. These practically says; Only Apache licensed code is developed, only Apache/BSD/MIT/++ (Category A) licensed code can be used in source form, and only Category B licensed software can be depended on in binary form, and Category X are not allwoed to be used in source or binary form. See http://people.apache.org/~rubys/3party.html 4. Qi4j is more commercial friend and allows for dependencies on any licensed software, as long as the code in our source repositories are Apache licensed, and that the documentation clearly indicates the consequences of using that particular part of Qi4j. There are possibly other scenarios. I have no strong opinion, and I was the one giving Tobias/Emil the go-ahead. So, right now the Apache licensed entitystore-neo4j has a dependency on org.neo4j:neo jar, which DOES NOT contain any licensing information. So, RIGHT NOW, the legal situation is unclear, slightly in favor of a "if you use the entitystore-neo4j you get a neo4j usage license as well free of charge"... (I urge Neo guys to clear this up) Feedback welcome. Cheers Niclas _______________________________________________ qi4j-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ops4j.org/mailman/listinfo/qi4j-dev
