Yeah I don't really understand the logic here. It's almost like they're considering themselves the root licensor for all projects that use the AGPL. Which (despite their intention) comes across as pretty hostile towards software authors.
I see it as similar to organic food. Once you add non-organic ingredients then it’s not organic any more. You can do what you want but it’s fair enough if everyone else asks you to respect the labels they’ve built to let people make informed decisions.
That's exactly what they did. Namely, they crafted a custom license that combined requirements from two other licenses -- granted in a confusing way.
> The authors are potentially setting users up for unintended infringement.
I do think the ambiguity in the contract language would certainly have bearing on any remedy the court would establish if they did find that the users infringed.
> I see it as similar to organic food. Once you add non-organic ingredients then it’s not organic any more. You can do what you want but it’s fair enough if everyone else asks you to respect the labels they’ve built to let people make informed decisions.
I'm not sure I see the similarities given that legal contracts are not a collection of labels. You don't sign a document that just says "lease" on it. If you're getting at the question of whether AGPLv3 + CC should be able to advertise itself as FOSS, then I agree, but that's not what this part of the conversation is about. If you're implying that they shouldn't be able to use the term "AGPLv3" in their license language, well I don't disagree but I don't know enough about the areas of law that would prevent that (is it trademarked? etc).
They then say:
> Neo4j Enterprise consists of modules from Neo4j Community Edition and modules licensed under AGPLv3 with the Commons Clause in this repository, and other closed source components not present in this repository.
I actually don't see them claiming their enterprise edition was ever open source, they also have an open source community edition licensed under GPL V3.
This is their License file:
https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/blob/3.4.13/enterprise/com/LI...
You can see the: "Commons Clause" License Condition at the end of it.
Also, the history of the project, their enterprise edition started as AGPL, and later versions they added the Commons Clause over it, and finally now they've just gone closed source, probably to avoid all these legal woes.