OnlyOffice accuses Euro-Office of licensing violations, suspends Nextcloud partnership

The software is built on the open-source code base owned by OnlyOffice and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL v3). OnlyOffice said in blog post that those accessing its code under this license are required to abide by conditions, such as retaining OnlyOffice’s branding and “providing proper attribution to the original technology.” OnlyOffice said that Euro-Office doesn’t meet these conditions, and therefore “any further use of the software is unauthorized and, as such, constitutes an infringement of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights.” The company also claims it was not contacted about the Euro-Office project prior to launch. In a separate blog post, Lev Bannov, OnlyOffice CEO, said that the Euro-Office project must “either restore our branding and attributions or roll back all forks of our project, refraining from using our code without proper acknowledgment of OnlyOffice.” “We firmly assert that the Euro-Office project is currently infringing on our copyright in a deliberate and unacceptable manner,” he said. OnlyOffice also said that it will suspend its partnership with Nextcloud, one of the Euro-Office project participants, due to the launch, and it accused Nextcloud of attempting to hire its staff and targeting its customers. Nextcloud offers integration with OnlyOffice’s software within its own software products, such as its Nextcloud Hub. Despite the partnership suspension, OnlyOffice pledged to continue to “support and develop the OnlyOffice connector for Nextcloud” that its customers rely on. Commenting on OnlyOffice’s copyright infringement claims, a Nextcloud spokesperson said: “As OnlyOffice itself states, its product is open source. Forks are a central component of the open-source ecosystem and are explicitly intended to enable further development, customization, and alternative governance models.” Nextcloud said the Euro-Office project has “transparently documented its legal reasoning” in a public repository on GitHub. It also claimed this view is “shared by the Free Software Foundation, the custodian of the AGPL and GPL licenses,” and pointed the FSF’s “GPL-compliant reasonable legal notices and author attributions” page. “The legal situation was also discussed with Bradley M. Kuhn, the creator of the AGPL license, and he supports our legal assessment 100,” the spokesperson said. “We are not opposed to forks — they are a natural and important part of the open-source ecosystem,” said Galina Goduhina, commercial director at OnlyOffice. “However, full compliance requires respecting the licensing terms in their entirety, including preserving required attribution elements such as product logos and branding where applicable, and ensuring accurate representation of the origin of the software.“It also means clearly informing users about what the product is based on, rather than presenting it in a way that could create confusion about authorship. In practical terms, this is about using open-source software responsibly, not rebranding it in a way that obscures its origin or suggests ownership where it does not exist,” Goduhina said. With regards to OnlyOffice’s announcement to end the partnership, the Nextcloud spokesperson said: “We are disappointed by their choice to end the collaboration because of our contributions to Euro-Office and we hope they will reconsider.” Euro-Office said on its project’s GitHub page that it chose to fork OnlyOffice’s code base rather than work with the company directly as a “last resort,” because “open collaboration with OnlyOffice was not possible, for a number of reasons.” Among these reasons, Euro-Office said, are that external contribution to OnlyOffice is “impossible or greatly discouraged,” and that the owners make “controversial decisions” such as the removal of mobile app features. Euro-Office also claimed OnlyOffice is a Russian company “despite many attempts to hide this,” which has raised customers’ concerns over potential influence or control by the Russian government. When asked for comment, an OnlyOffice spokesperson pointed to an April 2 blog post that says the owner company, Ascensio System SIA, is headquartered in Latvia and is a subsidiary of OnlyOffice Capital Group, which is registered in Singapore. The post says OnlyOffice’s Russian business segment was sold in 2019, and a fork of OnlyOffice called R7-Office was created for the Russian market. There is currently “no shared codebase, ownership, or ongoing cooperation” between OnlyOffice and R7-Office, according to the post. The dispute could create uncertainty for organizations considering Euro-Office’s platform, said Dario Maisto, senior analyst at Forrester. “Offering an enterprise-grade alternative suite to Microsoft and Google in Europe is not just about functionality and sovereignty, but also about offering the same level of reliability that enterprise IT leaders are used to,” he said. The situation also points to the difficulty in creating a sovereign alternative to established US software vendors that have decades of experience and millions of business customers, he said, despite clear enthusiasm from local vendors. “The build of an enterprise-ready European sovereign alternative is going to take time,” he said, with European companies potentially opting for “sovereign” (locally hosted) versions of established US-based suites instead, “which may decrease the overall market potential for the European players.” Related reading: Euro-Office billed as Europe’s sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office Global uncertainty is reshaping cloud strategies in Europe EU looks to bolster its open-source sector to counter US cloud dominance