Committed to open source

One of the key things that we have seen happening in Enterprise information technology is the true and massive adoption of open source technologies for many of its business-critical applications. This has been an evolution that has lasted a decade at least, starting with peripheral systems such as web servers (in the days when web servers were still considered to be serving static web pages), but gradually evolving to mission critical operating systems, content management applications, CRM systems, and databases such as Neo4j.

There are many interesting aspects to open source software, but some of the most often quoted are listed as follows:

• Lower chance of vendor lock-in: As the code is readily available, the user of the software can also read the code themselves and potentially understand how to work with it (and extend it, fix it, audit it, and so on) independently of the vendor.
• Better security: As the code is undergoing public scrutiny and because there is no way for a developer to implement security through obscurity (for example, using a proprietary algorithm that no one knows and would have to reverse engineer), open source software systems should be intrinsically more secure.
• Easier support and troubleshooting: As both the vendor and customer have access to the source code, it should be easier to exchange detailed, debug-level information about the running system and pinpoint problems.
• More innovation through extensibility: By exposing source code, many people left and right will start playing with the software--even without the original author knowing that this is going on. This typically causes these community contributors to solve problems that they encounter with the product in their specific use cases, and it leads to faster innovation and extensibility of the solution.
• Supporting (fundamental and applied) research: Open source solutions--even the ones equipped with enterprise commercial features such as Neo4j--usually allow researchers to use the software for free. Most researchers also publish their work as open source code. So, it's a two-way street.
• Cheaper: Open source software tends to use fair licensing models. You only need to pay if you derive value from the software and are not able to contribute your code. This not only allows for cheaper evaluation of the software in the start of the process but also allows enterprises to start with limited investments and grow gradually as the use expands.

I believe that all this is true for Neo4j. Let's look at the different parameter axes that determine the license model. Three parameters, which are explained in the following sections, are important.