ONLYOFFICE ends its partnership with Nextcloud over new unauthorized "Euro-Office" fork
ONLYOFFICE has suspended its eight year partnership with Nextcloud after Nextcloud, IONOS, and other European companies announced "Euro-Office", a fork of the ONLYOFFICE repository. The move affects a long standing integration used by self hosted Nextcloud users for real time document editing and collaboration.
Euro-Office is being presented as an open source, European controlled alternative to Microsoft Office, with a focus on compatibility and software sovereignty. ONLYOFFICE argues the fork violates the GNU Affero General Public License v3 by repackaging its code without keeping required branding, logos, and attribution. It also says the project was launched without prior notice, calling it a major breach of trust, and adds that tensions had already grown over alleged attempts by Nextcloud to recruit employees and influence customers against the company.
Nextcloud, meanwhile, says the fork was driven by concerns about ONLYOFFICE’s Russian origins, limited transparency, and a contribution process it sees as restrictive. ONLYOFFICE says existing customers and partners will not be affected, while broader criticism from LibreOffice has added to the dispute by questioning ONLYOFFICE’s open source positioning and its strong focus on Microsoft file formats over open standards.
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Related news
External links
- ONLYOFFICE's Thread on X@only_office on X • Official source
- Euro-Office: European industry initiative launches office suiteNextcloud • Official source
- Euro-Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google DocsXDA
- Nextcloud And Ionos Launch Open Source Euro-Office To Challenge MicrosoftOpen Source For You
- ONLYOFFICE suspends Nextcloud partnership over unapproved 'Euro-Office' forkNeowin
Comments
OnlyOffice is in the wrong here. They are violating the ethos of open source by adding additional requirements on top of the GPLv3 licensing:
"Pursuant to Section 7 § 3(b) of the GNU AGPL you must retain the original ONLYOFFICE logo in the upper left corner of the user interface when distributing the software.
Pursuant to Section 7 § 3(e) we decline to grant you any rights under trademark law for use of our trademarks."
Essentially making Only Office proprietary beyond allowing people to read their code
Onlyoffice is really nice, that sucks. Abusing the AGPL sucks if that's true.
Libreoffice can say whatever they want, they still manage to have compatibility issues between two versions of libreoffice... Onlyoffice handles things well as far as I have seen.
The main problem with LibreOffice lies in its antique code base. Beside compatibility issues and bugs persisted for years, back then people didn't consider about online/mobile platform, which unfortunately is very prevalent nowadays. Sure we have Collabora as an online version of Libre, but to make it work they have to handle things on server side instead of client side, and that put a heavy toll on the server (too costly to run). Honestly, unless Libre gets a complete rewrite it'll forever remain as a niche option for individual users only. Forking OnlyOffice makes sense as they can get the goodness of both sides: code easier to work with + active community contribution.
I feel vindicated 😃🙌
So it's open-source office suite drama now.
It's true that Only Office's editor, Ascensio System, is not the most transparent company, even it tried to distance itself from Russia since 2023. There is no documented ties to Russian government for the last few years (and Microsoft's ties to NSA are much worrying).
It's also true that contributions to Only Office are very difficult if not impossible since the company manages nearly all development (such as SQLite does, for licensing reasons), for the free and the commercial versions, and doesn't offer any community project.
Sure, lowering the barrier for contributions and supporting the project from many open-source companies can only be a great thing for open-source community (once AGPL issues are sorted out) but there is still way to go (like offering releases for the desktop versions), because, as stated, the trust from Ascension has been breached.
So let's hope this new project will be as successful as LibreOffice has been since OpenOffice felt.
Sounds like a pretty scummy thing to do.