OwnCloud App Licensing

Some people and most companies have a strange perception about the value of code.

"We spent $100,000 on this project therefore the code must be worth that" and feel a need to protect it.

In reality most code is more like paint. You spend $100 on paint and $200 dollars to apply it to your walls. But now the paint is worth nothing, you cannot sell it, nobody wants it, and even if they did you cannot take it of your wall and put it on somebody else's wall.

It may enhance the value of the building but you cannot realize this without selling the building.

You could "steal" Amazons code base (most of it is freely available from various open source projects) and set up an Ammassons web site but you would not take over much of Amazons business.

Code is a necessary part of any modern businesses infrastructure, but, it only has value as part of a process and culture, on its own its worth nothing.

I would add there are some situations where the code is vital to the business and would be valuable enough to any competitor that it should be kept secret:

• To prevent malicious manipulation of your facilities -- a good example would be Google's "page rank" system which is constantly being "gamed" to give web sites an unjustifiably high rank.
• Automated Trading Algorithms -- an unscrupulous competitor could study the algorithm and fool your system into selling too low and buying too high.
• A "faster/better" algorithim -- if your software' s unique selling point is a faster better algorithm for sorting/compressing/whatever then it probably pays to keep this a trade secret for as long as possible.

Closed source means the same thing for server-side software as for all other kinds of software: The source code is not available to the users of the software (or only under very restrictive conditions).

If you write software that communicates over a network with other software, then your choice of license for your software is not affected by the copyright license that is used for the remote software you communicate with. (Just think about it, if the AGPL affected the software used to access an AGPL site, users of IE would be in violation of copyright. That can't be right.)
This means that it is no problem to access a service that uses AGPL with a closed-source application.

The (A)GPL license of Neo4j would start to kick in if you make modifications to Neo4j or if your application builds upon Neo4j in the sense that Neo4j is included in your application as a library.