Euro-Office vs ONLYOFFICE: The European fork that sparked a legal war

Key points:
  • The European Fork: Nextcloud, IONOS and other European firms create "Euro-Office" based on the ONLYOFFICE code to seek greater technological sovereignty.
  • The Legal Conflict: Euro-Office removed the additional clauses of the AGPLv3 license that required the ONLYOFFICE logo and trademark to be maintained.
  • ONLYOFFICE's Position: Ascensio System states that the license is indivisible; deleting the logo clause automatically voids the right to use the codebase.
  • Opacity and Geopolitics: The European consortium justifies the fork by denouncing that ONLYOFFICE ignores contributions, uses obfuscated code, and has a large part of its team in Russia.
  • The Free Debate: The case tests the limits of Section 7 of the AGPLv3 regarding whether a logo is an attribution of authorship or simply a trademark.
David Y. Naranjo

4 minutes

euro-office-vs-onlyoffice-fork-license-agplv3-demand

A legal and philosophical conflict has just shaken the open-source software ecosystem. And it's because recently a consortium of European heavyweights (led by Nextcloud and IONOS, along with Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject and others) has announced the launch of Euro-Office, a new collaborative document editing platform. However, it's not code written from scratch, but rather a fork (fork) direct from the well-known ONLYOFFICE office suite.

This launch has sparked a warbecause the creators of Euro-Office They have modified the terms of the AGPLv3 license under which ONLYOFFICE is distributed, removing specific clauses that required the original logo and trademark to be maintained in any derivative work.

Ascensio System, ONLYOFFICE's parent company, He described this move as a blatant violation of copyright and intellectual property rights. international, demanding an immediate rectification and opening a critical debate on the limits of free licenses and technological sovereignty.

The trigger for the bifurcation

The Proponents of Euro-Office argue that the creation of this bifurcation was not a whim.but rather an operational necessity in the face of a hostile and opaque development environment. The European consortium publicly outlined a list of grievances against ONLYOFFICE's management:

  • Opacity in development: European developers are denouncing Ascensio System for systematically ignoring community pull requests, failing to review external code, and maintaining outdated build instructions. They also criticize the fact that commit messages reference inaccessible internal bug tracking systems and that the presence of obfuscated code, binaries, and comments severely hinders international collaboration.
  • Geopolitics and trust: The consortium emphasizes that a significant portion of the ONLYOFFICE development team is located in Russia. In the current political climate, European companies believe that this dependency, coupled with the project's lack of transparency, undermines the trust necessary to integrate the suite into critical government and corporate infrastructure in Europe.
  • Unilateral decisions: ONLYOFFICE is accused of taking controversial measures without consulting the community, such as disabling editing in the mobile app (which also depends on proprietary components) or removing the administration panel.

The licensing war: AGPLv3 vs Additional Clauses

The core of the legal conflict lies in the interpretation of the Affero General Public License of GNU v3 (AGPLv3), as Since 2021, ONLYOFFICE has distributed its code under this license. but by making use of Section 7, which It allows authors to add additional terms.

Specifically, ONLYOFFICE added on line 655 of your license two non-negotiable conditions: the obligation to retain the original logo in derivative works (Section 7(b)) and the express prohibition of granting rights over its registered trademarks (Section 7(e)).

The Euro-Office developers removed these add-ons and the contact information for Ascensio System. Their justification rests on the fact that Section 7 of the AGPLv3 itself grants users the right to remove any additional restrictions beyond those strictly stipulated in sections 7(a) to 7(f). According to the European consortium, a logo is a trademark element, not a mechanism for attributing authorship (a position they argue is supported by the Free Software Foundation).

ONLYOFFICE's response

LAscensio System's response was not long in coming, publishing a statement written in a strictly legal tone. For ONLYOFFICE, the Euro-Office initiative is not an exercise in technological innovation, but a breach of contract.

ONLYOFFICE's legal team argues that the right to create a derivative work (a fork) stems solely and exclusively from the granting of the original license, and that this grant is "conditional and indivisible". According to their position, the AGPLv3 license is not an à la carte menu: The recipient must accept the license in its entirety, including the additional conditions in Section 7, or else they acquire no rights to the code.

ONLYOFFICE maintains that any unilateral attempt to erase or ignore the obligation Maintaining the logo constitutes a use that exceeds the license grantedInvoking Section 8 of the AGPLv3, they declare that this breach results in the automatic termination of Euro-Office's rights to use the software. Consequently, they demand full and immediate compliance with the terms, refusing to discuss the allegations of opacity and geopolitics until the logo and brand attribution are restored in Euro-Office's code.

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