Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Meanwhile, Collabora splits from LibreOffice Online amid claims TDF ejected 'all Collabora staff and partners'
European outfits Ionos and Nextcloud have launched Euro-Office, a fork of the OnlyOffice cloud-based productivity suite aimed at orgs with qualms around sovereignty, provoking an angry response from the original developer.

Fork YOU!

Sure, take the code.

Then what?

A few days ago, a "coalition of European enterprises and community organizations," fronted by German self-hosted cloud vendor Nextcloud, together launched Euro-Office , a "true sovereign office suite" and "replacement for Microsoft Office with intuitive interface and strong compatibility."
Euro-Office is not brand new code that appeared from nowhere.

Rather, it is a fork of the existing OnlyOffice suite, which we've looked at a couple of times, such as when OnlyOffice 7.2 appeared in 2022, and the following year, when we compared OnlyOffice 7.3 with the Chinese freeware suite WPS Office .

The Euro-Office GitHub readme specifically mentions the project had problems cooperating with OnlyOffice, saying that the code is GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), and claiming that OnlyOffice is a difficult company to collaborate with.

Press releases tend to be written in euphemistic marketing-speak.

There is some hope that LLM-based machine translation will handle this soon – there is already a splendid LinkedIn translator in case you need a chuckle – but this feeble fleshling on FOSS desk will use his head meat to translate it.

Reason: It looks similar to Microsoft Office.

Your users are probably technophobes.

This won't freak them out.

Translation 1: It defaults to Microsoft file formats.

Reason: You can keep all your files.

Context: Another jab at LibreOffice, which defaults to its own formats – for what its overseers at The Document Foundation consider strong reasons .

Translation 2: It runs in a web browser.

Reason: You don't need to install anything, and the same tools work the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux clients.

Context: It doesn't look like a native app on anything, but it's close enough for government work .

Translation: This is an EU effort.

Reason: It's not American, but more directly, it's not Russian.

Context: The OnlyOffice HQ is in Latvia, but there are many signs that it was developed in Russia.

Meanwhile, Ionos and Nextcloud have said that OnlyOffice's Russian roots are not a security risk for Euro-Office, with Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek stating : "We can vouch for our version."
Rivals like Collabora have made a point of highlighting OnlyOffice's apparent Russian roots, however, and last year published a comparative chart of Collabora Online and OnlyOffice highlighting its own UK base under the heading Origin and Ownership .

In Russia, a similar-looking office suite is actively sold under the name Р7-Офис /R7-OFIS – in other words, "R7-Office." JSC R7, the company that develops and sells R7-Office in Russia, is based in Nizhny Novgorod .

Since the Euro-Office announcement, Collabora has published another analysis, this time questioning whether Euro-Office is a truly European Office Suite , noting the extensive Russian-language code comments in the codebase Euro-Office inherited from OnlyOffice.

Latvia, incidentially, has the largest Russian minority in the EU, a hefty chunk of whom speak Russian.

OnlyOffice is extremely unhappy about the fork.

It has published an analysis claiming NextCloud and Ionos are guilty of license violations with the Euro-Office project .

OnlyOffice is made available under version 3 of AGPL , which is designed to protect Free Software rights for SaaS applications, where the software might never leave its creator's servers and the users only access it over the network.

It obliges the vendor to provide those users with the source code if they want, but it does make the provision for the service provider to protect its logos and trademarks.

Specifically, in section 7, headed Additional Terms, the AGPL3 says:
"Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.

It notes that this can cover trademarks and so on:
OnlyOffice added a permission , which says:
Pursuant to Section 7(b) of the License you must retain the original Product logo when distributing the program.

Pursuant to Section 7(e) we decline to grant you any rights under trademark law for use of our trademarks.

Under AGPLv3 Section 7, downstream recipients may remove terms that constitute "further restrictions" beyond what Section 7(a)-(f) permits, as affirmed by the FSF.

The Register asked legal boffin Neil Brown of decoded.legal to weigh in, and he commented:
I would need to dig back through the voluminous discussions, but I should be most surprised if, when the {A}GPLv3 was being drafted, it was with the intention that s7(b) – about preserving legal notices and attribution – could be wielded in such a manner so as to prevent reuse of a covered work.

Unlike the bulk of internet commenters, Brown is a real solicitor and does not merely play one on the internet.

However, we're amused to note that the commentators of Hacker News and indeed those of Lobsters seem to agree.

OnlyOffice has issued a flurry of announcements since the news.

On Monday, it published an interview with CEO Lev Bannov (who lives in Istanbul and is, we understand, a Turkish citizen) on the Euro-Office situation.

As the creators of OnlyOffice, we want to make our position unequivocally clear: we do not grant anyone the right to remove our branding or alter our open source code without proper attribution.

Yesterday, OnlyOffice announced that its partnership with Nextcloud has been suspended .

So what was Nextcloud thinking anyway?

We asked if the motivation was a desire to move away from Collabora code, or to move away from a product with Russian roots.

Jos Poortvliet, VP Communications & Product Strategy, gave us the following statement:
Well, more the second.

Of course it is the gap in the market that was the motivation.

There are technical differences to the approaches of the office solutions, and we saw a need for an office that is a full web app, rather than running mostly on the server – but also developed under an open, transparent governance model and welcoming to contributors.

The legal situation was also discussed with Bradley M.

Kuhn, the creator of the AGPL license, and he supports our legal assessment 100 percent.

Saying that, this one, if you will forgive us a cliché, could run and run.

It is interesting to note that, a decade ago, Nextcloud got started as a hostile fork of ownCloud , run by original ownCloud co-founder Frank Karlitschek and many of the original developers.

This origin story is very similar to that of LibreOffice, where the developers of OpenOffice filed for divorce from Oracle , which had acquired the suite when it bought Sun .

Early last month, we covered the launch of the new Office.EU hosted suite .

This hosted offering is also based on Nextcloud, and we spent some time going into the history of Nextcloud and its integration with office suites.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP
To recap, Nextcloud released version 18.0.0 in January 2020, using OnlyOffice as its default integrated online office suite.

This was followed by the release of Nextcloud version 19.0.0 in June 2020, which switched the default office suite to Collabora Office instead.

Yesterday, Collabora published a post claiming that The Document Foundation has ejected "all Collabora staff and partners." We have no reason to believe that this apparent rift between The Document Foundation and Collabora was a motivation for the decision to fork OnlyOffice instead, but it is not a reassuring development.

The Document Foundation is also unhappy about this development.

It has blogged about this, publishing an Open Letter to European Citizens .

It is much less direct than Collabora, but it talks about the importance of considering geopolitics and of choosing between rival efforts.

We also spoke with The Document Foundation's Paolo Vecchi, who cited Heise's coverage of the launch , in which Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek said:
LibreOffice is 35 years old and no longer the most innovative and fluid.

You can also notice that in the browser.

I'm not very impressed by Frank's comment about LibreOffice here.

Vecchi also noted that there were several existing FOSS offerings in this space already, including openDesk from ZenDiS, which is used by the International Criminal Court , and the French LaSuite [naturellement, en Français], which both use Matrix .

The second Trump presidency has caused hugely renewed interest in European digital sovereignty .

There is the scent of government money wafting around, and like blood in the water, it's inciting a feeding frenzy in the eternally underfunded world of open source.

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