Stop saying Open Source when it’s not. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we’ve always known: that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open source license.

You can read the decision here. The facts, as described by the trial court, are that Neo4j, Inc. had been through several releases of its software and several license choices along the way, ending with what the court called “the Sweden Software License,” because the licensor was a Swedish subsidiary of the plaintiff.

This “Swedish license” was simply the combination of the Affero General Public License with an additional restriction known as the Commons Clause. The defendants forked the software, renamed it “Open Native Graph Database” (ONgDB), and started distributing their version as AGPLv3-only licensed