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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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[–] 2 points 5 months ago

This is “open” source and it was the main reason it got forked (lots of proprietary bits included as binary, impossible to send a PR, obfuscated code)

Wasn't this methodology the whole reason GPL 2 evolved to GPL 3 because Tivo was doing this exact thing? They used the underlying open source free work of others, but then wrap their own contributions in priopriatry binaries not distributed with source code. This method wasn't in violation of the letter of GPL rules even though it was clearly a violation of the spirit of the GPL rules.

How are they able to skirt the GPL 3 rules this time?

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