False advertising to call software open source when it's not, says court

Last year, the Graph Foundation had to rethink how it develops and distributes its Open Native Graph Database (ONgDB) after it settled a trademark and copyright claim by database biz Neo4j. The Graph Foundation agreed [PDF] it would no longer claim specific versions of ONgDB, its Neo4j Enterprise Edition fork, are a "100 …

[Pascal Monett]

That was pretty bold

Spouting Open Source claims all over your website when your license has nothing to do with Open Source.

I'm glad somebody stood up to this nonsense.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: That was pretty bold

It'd have been interesting if someone took their "open source" claim and forked the software themselves. That court case would've been interesting, especially the prosecutions arguments that their open source isn't open source, shooting themselves in the foot.

[FeepingCreature]

Subtle difference

This is also why Elastic only describes Elasticsearch as "free and open", not open source.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Subtle difference

Still smelly though

[Binraider]

"OpenText Explorer", which is neither Open Source, built upon Open Source, or very good at exploring documents.

I can think of others.

[heyrick]

I think it's a bit of a leap to directly equate the word Open with Open Source.

But in this case, extremely clearly Open Source wasn't.

[Binraider]

I fail to see the difference with the name Open Native Graph DB and OpenText.

Both imply things that they aren't.

[badflorist]

It's identical to me. It's how you use it and it is clearly riding the coat tails of "open source".

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” - Bill Clinton

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not *the name* that was an issue, whether it contains Open or not is irrelevant,

It was the claim, wholly separate from the naming, that their product was "open source", using both words together.

[FeepingCreature]

"Office Open XML", famously.

[Graham Dawson]

There's no lie in the name. It's XML that you Open with Office. The fact that you read it as implying anything other than that is entirely your fault.

[Charlie Clark]

The specification is open. Though it was a fight to get it that far!

[Nick Ryan]

...and total nonsense unusable. It repeatedly referred to closed specification blobs... which were defined in Microsoft Word 6, for example.

[Charlie Clark]

Bug reports are indeed managed in Word and Excel online and the specification isn't without its problems (it is very long, verbose and in parts contradictory and inaccurate) but makes it neither nonsense nor unusable.

[Nick Ryan]

Some parts of the mock specification referred to binary blob data as stored by Microsoft Word or Excel. That's not an open specification, it's a joke. Likewise some parts of the specification stated "handle like Microsoft Word handles it", which is also not an open specification

[katrinab]

But "open" without source could just mean that it opens text files and explores them ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Blurred boundaries

Let's not get into the plethora of 'reputable' closed source projects built ostensibly on open source libraries for all the tricksy stuff.