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Euro-Office: European industry initiative launches office suite (nextcloud.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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coalition of European enterprises and community organizations today have launched Euro-Office, a solution for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, developed as a true sovereign community collaboration of over a dozen different organizations.

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[–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

The problem with this is that OnlyOffice owns the copyright and used attribution agreements from any contributions. Meaning, as owners of the copyright, they are allowed to set the license. So if they applied the AGPL wrong, they aren't violating anyone else's copyright. If OnlyOffice has used someone else's AGPL code and then added these impossible restrictions, then I would agree.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    They took AGPL3 and added a clause to it under a section where you're allowed to add clauses.

    However in AGPL3 it says you're not allowed to add restrictions.

    So in their own liscence it says they are not allowed to add restrictions beyond a certain scope.

    And then they break that rule.

    So I'd say their extra clause, according to they liscence they released, is invalid

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    If they're the copyright holder, they are allowed to use any license they want. Including a modified AGPL. It's up to the users to understand what license they're getting the software under. In this case, it is a modified-AGPL.

    This is like Qt when they used the modified GPL (Qt 2-3 era, before they went full LGPL). Qt was the copyright holder and can issue under terms they decide. Then it is up to the users to decide if those terms are acceptable. KDE decided these terms were acceptable, but some other users did not.

    However, if a user decided to ignore the additional clauses in Qt and treat it as unmodified GPL, they would have been in violation of the license. Because Qt was the the copyright holder and can dictate terms. Qt would have won the court case. It never happened, so it wasn't tested, and that's ancient history now.

    But here OnlyOffice is in the same boat. They can dictate the terms, and a court can decide if a user is in adherence of those terms. There's no part of copyright law that OnlyOffice is violating here.

    What will be up for legal debate is whether EuroOffice is willfully and maliciously violating it, or if they just interpreted differently. If the latter, then there will be a great deal of legalese. The real question will be: the AGPL as amended by OnlyOffice -- does it permit forking, and are forks subject to the same modified clauses.

    I suspect OnlyOffice wins this one if it actually goes to court. Which will be super annoying from an end user perspective.

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