VM (Vicky) Brasseur

Well, this is worrying.

“If the appellate court upholds that decision, which endorsed database maker Neo4j's right to amend the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, governing the use of its software with new binding terms, current assumptions about the enforceability of copyleft licenses will no longer apply.”

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/adverse_appeals_court_ruling_could/

#OpenSource #FreeSoftware #Licensing #FOSS

FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license

Defense of FOSS licensing rests on the shoulders of a guy in Virginia

The Register
Feb 27 at 4:26pmWeb
Show threadBradley M. KuhnFeb 27

Suhy, in Claburn's article, exaggerates the danger here (understandable, since he's also got a huge financial judgement against him from the lower court, too).

There is only *one* part of the v3-group of licenses that could be impacted here, which is (A)GPLv3§7¶4. Even if all this goes the wrong way (which I hope it doesn't), that is the *only* part of of the licenses that would, in my expert opinion, be impacted.

IANAL and TINLA

Show threadJ. "Henry" WaughFeb 27

@vmbrasseur @bkuhn on top of that, this is the 9th Circuit

The same circuit which wanted to grant the ability to copyright an API in Oracle v. Google and wrote it from the bench when a jury would not find it for them when "guided" to

This forced the Supreme Court to turn it into Google v. Oracle so as to rule "no, get out of here" (EDIT: confused unanimity with a diff copyright case)

That's the other reason I'm not panicking. They're off their rocker and even other courts know it.

Show threadThe TurtleFeb 27
@vmbrasseur anybody considered the possibility of "never buy shit from Neo4j?"
Show threadLauraFeb 27
@the_turtle @vmbrasseur That won't impact case law.
Show threadJoe GratzFeb 28
@vmbrasseur this article completely omits what the argument is actually about — whether the “no further restrictions” language applies to someone initially releasing a codebase they have full ownership of under the GPL (where they could have picked any license or written their own), or whether it just applies to downstream licensees who are using the GPL’d code of others (which is where it would matter most). Much harder question at least.
Show threadVM (Vicky) BrasseurFeb 28
@dreamword Ooooh. That's a big omission. Many thanks for adding that info here! <3