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Comment by Gudahtt | Hacker News Reader

Oh? Neo4j is free. The Community edition is GPLv3, and the Enterprise edition is AGPLv3.

The Enterprise Edition is not AGPL. It's under one of "Neo4j Commercial License", "Neo4j Evaluation License", "Neo4j Educational License", or "Fair Trade Licensing". In other words it's not free. Why would I want to use the "Community Edition" of a company whose interest is to force me into buying their Enterprise Edition? The more people use this "Community Edition", and the more they are encouraged to force their "Enterprise Edition" under my throat, because "it will be easier to buy a proprietary plugin than change database". They are already restricting the use of important features such as "Unlimited graph size", "Database storage reallocation", "Schema constraints", "Runtime to accelerate common queries", "Role-based security", "Kerberos Security", "Load balancing", etc. Why would I want to get into this?! I'd rather spend my time learning and contributing to Jena or Janus than a bait "Community Edition".

There's nothing wrong with companies charging for software products.

I agree. This is not the point though, nor what I said.

The "enterprise edition" is AGPL. Feel free to interpret it differently then Neo does, but the license is AGPL [1]. Anyways, I don't understand the hostility. They're tying to walk the line between a profitable company selling software while still doing it all in the open. The fact that they kept things open source and not closed was one of the things I loved about working there.

1. https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/blob/3.3/README.asciidoc

So, are you saying that Neo4j is 100% free as in "100% AGPL, otherwise Commercial License if you don't want to use the AGPL"? In other words, the code is exactly the same, only with a different license?

Yes, that is the case.

According to [this page](https://neo4j.com/editions/) it's not. In fact, they are restricting important functionalities to their Enterprise Edition exclusively. Which means, the codebase is not the same.

Yes, the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition are different. Certain functionality is restricted to the Enterprise Edition. It's a different codebase. I didn't say otherwise.

You can see it here: http://github.com/neo4j/neo4j

See how there are 'community' and 'enterprise' top-level directories? The 'enterprise' directory contains the enterprise-specific code. It's a separate project in some senses but it does share the same repository, and it is open source.

As you can also see by looking at that repository, the Enterprise Edition is licensed as AGPL. Here is the license: https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/blob/3.3/enterprise/LICENSE.t...

I'll quote:

    If you have not executed a Commercial Agreement with Neo Technology, the
    Software is subject to the terms of the GNU AFFERO 
    GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
    Version 3, as follows:

Then follows the AGPL license.

It is AGPL; it's dual licensed. You can use it freely under the terms of AGPL, or you can enter into a commercial agreement with Neo Technology and use it without the restrictions imposed by the AGPL.

Here's the license: https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/blob/3.3/enterprise/LICENSE.t...

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