102
ONLYOFFICE flags license violations in “Euro-Office” project
(www.onlyoffice.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
102 points (98.1% liked)
Opensource
5851 readers
62 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The legal argument is a bit dubious and clearly in violation of the idea of the AGPL, but I guess this is something courts will have to settle.
Dunno how that could be since the idea of requiring attribution is specifically called out in Section 7, item B.
Almost certainly true.
But requiring that the logo be retained is not.
Now, it's not entirely clear what they even are asking for. If the ask is that the OnlyOffice logo be included in a 'credits' page (which is perhaps a reasonable interpretation of "you must retain the original Product logo when distributing the program") then it is much less problematic, although perhaps still beyond requiring attribution, than if they are trying to demand that, say, the favicon of the webapp must not be changed (especially if their intent is also to say that you can't distribute the program if you don't change the favicon because it would be a trademark violation).
Now of course, if they have written all of OnlyOffice in house, and not had any external contributors or used any external copyleft code, then they can re-license OnlyOffice on whatever terms. If they were bound to the licence by including other people's AGPL contributions, then they have to follow the licence themselves, and cannot add arbitrary additional restrictions.
note that relicensing would practically only apply to the code following a relicense, since the previous license means you had released contributions under the previous license on publish
Attribution isn't the problem. They try to circumvent the AGPL by making their trademarked logo part of the attribution, thus basically forbidding any of the rights people normally have under the AGPL.
I thought Europe already had case law surrounding this while the US have never taken it as far as courts and paid an undisclosed sum.
In Europe I'm now aware of any common law or precedence law approaches so even if there'd be a case like you described (which I would be interested in!) it wouldn't have binding qualities for the bullshit that onlyoffice is pulling off.
Dipshits.
as a person with an american background who has absolutely no clue what he's talking about, IIRC if there's a long series of previous decisions it would still be very persuasive under civil law (jurisprudence constante). I cannot find any similar decisions either, though.
Oh yeahz you're right from what I know! Reference cases are used, at least in Germany, all the time, especially looking at the closing argument of the judgment itself (according to that one judge podcast I listen to which makes me an internet expert, doesn't it?).
Good point!
wait which podcast is that that sounds interesting
"Sag Mal Du als Richterin", but it's locked away behind the audible paywall sadly.
What case are you referring to?
A bunch of German ones.
https://www.jipitec.eu/jipitec/article/download/41/37/73
From a quick glance, none of these examples are similar to the OnlyOffice claim.