OnlyOffice kills Nextcloud partnership for forking its project without approval (neowin.net)

by bundie 94 comments 65 points
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94 comments

[−] c-hendricks 44d ago
Seems onlyoffice is "unforkable"? It's AGPL but has extra restrictions: you're required to show their logo but they don't give out rights for others to use their logo.
[−] AdmiralAsshat 44d ago
If "forking without approval" is grounds for some kind of termination, then the project should probably not be considered truly "open source".
[−] MadVikingGod 44d ago
I was wondering about how they came to the conclusion that they violated the copyright, so I went to check if they did the AGPL[1] with some extra clauses in it. Turns out they didn't, but they did change[2] it[3] in an interesting way: All the https urls in the GNU version are http urls.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt

[2]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/core/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

[3]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/onlyoffice-nextcloud/blob/mast...

[−] 76rp 43d ago
I agree with the posters above that OnlyOffice conflates retaining branding with retaining attribution.

However, AGPL doesn't require retaining attributions other than copyright notices by default. Under section 7b, the copyright holder can specify which attributions to retain.

Under 7b, OnlyOffice specified that forks must "retain the original Product logo". I agree with others that this is not a legitimate way to request attribution, and therefore this could be removed from the license. See section 7:

>If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

Therefore, I think there is no obligation to attribute OnlyOffice, only to retain the original copyright notices.

----

Additionally, I haven't seen any evidence for the claim that Euro-Office actually removed the logos from their fork. Can anybody find such a commit?

[−] dotdi 44d ago
Important bit of information is further down in the article: OnlyOffice is Russian. I would therefore view any collaboration as a risk. It's not adequate for strategic reasons as well as sovereignty.
[−] t0mas88 44d ago
Isn't the whole idea behind AGPL that you're allowed to fork and modify it as long as you provide your modified source code to the users?
[−] 627467 44d ago
An example of how european "tech" reacts to threats. 2 european open source projects in litigation with each other and one of them engineered a license to prevent an obvious feature of open source software (forking) while the other is throwing shades at opacity and geopolitical control at the first.
[−] maxnoe 44d ago
There is a section in the GitHub Readme of Eurooffice with a justification of the fork:

https://github.com/Euro-Office#euro-office-liberates-the-onl...

[−] gunalx 44d ago
Only onlyoffice being petty. A good reason to use LibreOffice or Collabora instead.
[−] davisr 44d ago
Hey mods/dang, can you put this back on the front page please? No reason to bounce it. Important licensing discussion and relevant!
[−] spacedoutman 44d ago
They should have used malus.sh instead
[−] jimnotgym 44d ago
Wow, how to alienate everyone.
[−] jeremie_strand 44d ago
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