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ONLYOFFICE accuses "Euro-Office" maker Nextcloud and IONOS of License Violation (www.onlyoffice.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months 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.

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