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ONLYOFFICE accuses "Euro-Office" maker Nextcloud and IONOS of License Violation (www.onlyoffice.com)
submitted 16 hours ago by zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
19 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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[-] Natanael@slrpnk.net 11 points 15 hours ago

You can't call it GPL3 and at the same time claim the copyright.

Weil you can (because you still own the copyright after giving your work that license), but you have given a legally binding promise to not impose additional restrictions so it won't do you any good to try

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

OK this is getting a bit hairy, but AFAIK only the creator of the GPL code maintains copyright, and can take his code to a closed source project.
BUT the code that has been released as GPL remains open source, and cannot be made to be NOT open source.
So anybody has a right to use it, as long as they keep it open source. So in the case of open source projects, it's academic that the creator of the code maintain the right to use it without the GPL conditions.

[-] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Yes, a creator can create a closed source copy (independent of the GPL'd work), assuming they have full ownership or permission from all contributors

It's not fully academic only because it's common for companies to develop a GPL version and offer commercial licenses where the corporate customer is exempt

But none of this affect the users of the GPL version, so most people don't care

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

assuming they have full ownership

You are mixing things up, I'm not talking about the project, I was exclusively talking about the code someone had made personally.
Linux for instance can never be made proprietary, because it's impossible to get permission from all developers.
But anyone who has contributed a piece of code, can use that piece in other projects under different licenses. Because they retain copyright to their own code.

So as I stated it is academic to the project, and it's especially academic to a fork of it.

this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
101 points (95.5% liked)

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