‘Euro-Office’: OnlyOffice accuses of license violations

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www.heise.de/en/news/Euro-Office-OnlyOffice-acc…

In a blog post, OnlyOffice publicly expresses its anger. Euro-Office is using technology derived from OnlyOffice in violation of license terms and international intellectual property law. OnlyOffice is subject to the AGPL-v3 license and imposes further conditions to ensure transparency and appropriate source attribution. According to OnlyOffice, these include retaining the OnlyOffice trademarks in derivative works, providing appropriate source attribution to the original technology, and fully complying with open-source requirements for distributing the software.

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Hasn’t OnlyOffice been accused of license shenanigans?

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Yes, those are the further terms

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Forks are a central part of the open-source ecosystem and are expressly intended to enable further development, adaptation, and also alternative governance models.

Yes, but the immovability of *GPL licenses is what protects the projects from exploitation. OO put an addition to that license that the name is part of the copyrighted thing. So if for whatever reason the work done by NC is not being merged into upstream, or is not being fast enough, there should be two OO. One from OO and a fork from NC. If the code-bases drift apart, well, now we have two incompatible OnlyOffices. In that case those additions might have been a dumb idea. But I think we can’t afford to have exceptions from enforceability of the license

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Onlyoffice’s unnamed lawyer, vs the author of AGPL and the FSF: I know whose opinion I’ll put more stock in.

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Easy fix: Don’t fork OnlyOffice. Start your own office suite and just happen to port over some parts of the code base that do not include any logos. Same, same but different.

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Or just fork Libreoffice online…

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They already explained why they didn’t.

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And their argument was quite shallow

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Or LLM cleanroom copy it, like the internet did when claude code source was leaked into other languages like rust

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This is the nightmare scenario for companies doing open source software. Regardless of how OnlyOffice behaves and their russian ties - other companies forking the whole codebase, removing the name and selling it is something that will prevent others from going the FOSS route

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