this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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79
ONLYOFFICE accuses "Euro-Office" maker Nextcloud and IONOS of License Violation (www.onlyoffice.com)
submitted 4 days ago by zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Recently, IONOS and Nextcloud announced their new, sovereign office suite called “Euro-Office” and claimed they were using components of ONLYOFFICE. It seems they are doing so without checking the licences first and without cooperating with them.

Original announcement:

Nextcloud and Ionos are promising a modern, open-source office suite for the summer. To achieve this goal, they have forked OnlyOffice.

heise.de

ONLYOFFICE reply:

Based on publicly available information, the “Euro-Office” project uses technology derived from ONLYOFFICE editors in violation of our licensing terms and of international intellectual property law.

onlyoffice.com

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[–] ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 4 days ago (2 children)

the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));

the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).

Uhhh is it just me or is it impossible to follow the first requirement without violating the second one? The logo requirement seems engineered to make sure that you can't actually fork the project: if you include the original logo, they can hit you for trademark violation, and if you don't include the logo they can say you violated their license terms.

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 17 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Difference between Open Source and "open" source

This is "open" source and it was the main reason it got forked (lots of proprietary bits included as binary, impossible to send a PR, obfuscated code)

It's "open" exclusively for marketing "our product is better because it's open source" and mostly because in this way they can use GPL 3 code for libraries without paying for a different license

Fuck them

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

This is “open” source and it was the main reason it got forked (lots of proprietary bits included as binary, impossible to send a PR, obfuscated code)

Wasn't this methodology the whole reason GPL 2 evolved to GPL 3 because Tivo was doing this exact thing? They used the underlying open source free work of others, but then wrap their own contributions in priopriatry binaries not distributed with source code. This method wasn't in violation of the letter of GPL rules even though it was clearly a violation of the spirit of the GPL rules.

How are they able to skirt the GPL 3 rules this time?

[–] IcyToes@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

"Source available" is the accepted term. Without a legitimate well tested open source license, it isn't free to distribute and therefore doesn't meet the one of the 4 principles of open source.".

[–] SnoringEarthworm@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 days ago

That sounds like source-available, not open source.