Glad you have permission. Have you tried using it while in your neighbor's house? (Or on his porch/etc...) If it works closer to the transmitter, then it is likely too low a signal at your place.
(And I apologize at least for my own apparent rudeness. I've seen too many people who are truly leeching, so when you didn't specify that you had permission, yes, that's what I assumed. You probably assumed that only people with permission would ask for help this way, whereas I assumed the opposite.)
You may want to ask the owner if they have any custom settings. Perhaps they don't have a DNS server set up in their router, so that you have to manually specify it. (I know a couple people that do that.)
As for sharing, myself and a couple of my neighbors all have open WiFi, with an open understanding that it's just fine to connect to any of ours. (There are parts of my house where I get my neighbor's WiFi better than my own; and my neighbor is in a similar situation, there are areas where he gets mine better than his.) In my case, I have a 5 GHz a+n, WPA2 encrypted, MAC-filtered, non-broadcast network for my own internal use; and a 2.4 GHz b-only 100% open network for sharing (and for my devices that don't have 5 GHz radios.) The b-only network also specifies to use an OpenDNS server with basic filtering turned on; so that my kids can't wander upon porn easily. (Yes, if you manually specify a DNS on your device, you can get around it; but my 15 year old isn't technically savvy enough to do that, and my 5 year old doesn't have permissions on her laptop; although I think she probably could do it if she did...)