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a little confused about something here.

Specifically I want to talk about Neo4j and it's licensing.

It's a dual license, GPLv3/AGPLv3, and I want to find out exactly what that's supposed to mean to me as a consumer of the software in binary form.

If I wanted to use the free Neo4j Community Edition, which I beleive is the GPLv3 license, for (let's pretend) a blog project, which would access the RESTful API to acquire data from the db. Am I free to keep my source code private?

The way GPL keeps getting trumpeted to me, is that anything to do with the code must be open sourced. As in, if I were to modify Neo itself I would need to display those changes publically. But the wording gets fuzzy to me and begins to make me think that the concept of simply using the binary on my server, anything reaching out to touch it, must become open source.

In extension, with this licensing, is one able to use Community Editon inside of a corperate/business setting for either internal tools or publishing of free content publically, so long as services being provided arent in any way locked behind a payment gate?

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  • You might get good answers over at a site aimed at talking about open source software - Open Source SE :)
    – Zizouz212
    Jul 28, 2016 at 0:10
  • Thank you @Zizouz212 for pointing me in the direction of this. Through taht I was able to find this Q opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2779/… which answers my question :) thank you
    – RedactedProfile
    Jul 28, 2016 at 0:27
  • That's great! If you're feeling generous, you can even answer your own question, quoting from the answer there :)
    – Zizouz212
    Jul 28, 2016 at 0:29
  • If you distribute the GPLv3 covered code or resulting binary in any form (dynamically or statically linked), you must also distribute your source. If it provides output via a service you do not distribute, you can keep it closed source. The AGPL is designed to plug that hole in the GPLv3 (for those who wish), where distributing program output is the same as distributing a GPL binary - you must open up.
    – user900
    Jul 28, 2016 at 10:06

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Thanks to Zizouz212 who made me aware of opensource.stackexchange.com I was able to find this question

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2779/using-neo4j-community-edition-in-commercial-applications

Within that answer bu Philipp, found something that spelled it all out for me:

This is also explained in the article I linked above:

If you’re building a database application that will run inside your organization (or for your personal use), then you are free to use Community Edition, whether or not your software is closed source. A very close analogy is MySQL®, which is also licensed under the GPL.

So there ya have it

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