The Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization that reviews licenses against Open Source criteria, has published an analysis of the court decision in the case against PureThink related to the infringement of intellectual property of Neo4j Inc.
Recall that PureThink created a fork of the Neo4j project, which was originally supplied under the AGPLv3 license, but then split into a free Community edition and a commercial version of Neo4 EE. For the commercial version, additional "Commons Clause" terms have been added to the text of the AGPL, restricting use in cloud services. Since there is a clause in the AGPLv3 license that allows you to remove additional restrictions that infringe on the rights granted by the AGPL, PureThink created its own fork of ONgDB based on the Neo4 EE product code, but began distributing it under the regular AGPL license and advertised it as a completely open version of Neo4 EE .
The court recognized as unlawful the removal in the fork of additional conditions added by Neo4j Inc to the text of the AGPL license, due to the fact that the change in the text of the license was made by the owner of property rights to the code and his actions are essentially a transfer of the project to a fundamentally new proprietary license created on the basis of AGPL.
The Court agreed with the plaintiff that the AGPL clause regarding the ability to remove additional terms applies only to the licensor, and the user is a licensee who must comply with paragraphs 7 and 10, which prohibit the licensee from imposing additional restrictions, but not prohibit the licensor from doing so. Any other interpretation of these clauses would be contrary to the basic principles of copyright, which give authors the exclusive right to license their product on terms of their choice.
At the same time, the authors of the AGPL license positioned the clause allowing the removal of additional restrictions (see note 73) primarily as a measure to counter abuse by the owners of the rights to the code, such as adding additional requirements with a ban on commercial use. But the court did not agree with this position and, based on the results of the previously considered case βNeo4j Inc v Graph Foundationβ, decided that the clause present in the AGPL license to counter the imposition of additional restrictions applies to the actions of users (licensees), and the owners of property rights to the code (licensors) are free to relicense.
At the same time, as before, the license can only be changed to the new code, and the old version of the code already opened under the AGPL remains available under the old license. Those. the defendant could develop a fork of code under pure AGPL in the state before the author changed the license, but basing a fork on new code with a changed license, considering it as code under pure AGPL, is unacceptable.
Source: opennet.ru