I'm working on a SaaS medical research startup project with a MIT license. The goal is for the source to be open (because then customers can help improve it and find bugs), and end-users who want to pay to use it can just go to the site and get started. If somebody wanted to fork it or borrow the code for another SaaS, I don't really care.
However, I want to use Neo4j for the Cypher query language, because I think it's pretty cool. We got into the Neo4j startup program but it lasts 1 year with no clarity whatsoever on what happens at the end of that year, and the Neo4j enterprise licenses are insanely expensive, like tens of thousands of dollars per server. There's a community edition licensed under GPLv3, and I was gonna run that on AWS.
Now for my problem. If my source code is on GitHub with MIT license, and I put "docker run neo4j" in the development code (to make a local database to test it) ... does that count as "distribution of GPLv3 software" and force me to GPL license my MIT licensed project? The software I write uses MIT / Apache 2.0 stuff and I want to keep it that way because it enables businesses to use my stuff without license headaches. Also, the stuff on github isn't for sale, rather, the hosted site is what I'd sell.
What happens when a MIT licensed project uses Apache 2.0 drivers to connect to GPLv3 databases? Does "docker run " count as distribution?
(Yeah, I know, "just use Postgres")
Thanks in advance for any advice or clarification, and yes, I know you're not a lawyer.
notice.md
file? Do I add a comment to the code I am modifying at the top? I am confused about what I need to do.