Jonas Sulzer on Nostr: 📣 OnlyOffice accusing the Euro-Office initiative (fork of OnlyOffice) of ...

📣 OnlyOffice accusing the Euro-Office initiative (fork of OnlyOffice) of infringing their additions to the AGPL license is absurd.

In short, OnlyOffice claims they can add conditions to AGPL which allow them to
a) force anyone to keep their logo/branding in the software.
b) you do not have the right to use their trademark.
If this were true, this would essentially mean that they could claim their software is open source, while taking away the essential freedoms an open source license gives you in it's very essence.

So let's look at this a bit closer:
OnlyOffice claim in their statement, that AGPL allows them to add the following additions thanks to section 7:
> - the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));
> - the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).

While technically it's true that supplementary terms can be added in accordance with section 7. But here is what the relevant parts of section 7 actually say:
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:
> b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
> e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or

So yes, while licensing your code as AGPL, you still can protect your logo and name through a trademark. This is commonly known and widely accepted. However, when it comes to the inclusion of the logo, OnlyOffices claim does not look well-grounded to me. The license says that you can add a term to enforce "requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions". This does not say, that you have to keep the logo and branding, which would fall under trademark rights, but only says that a fork like Euro-Office would need to keep attribution in a reasonable way: state that it's a fork of OnlyOffice and include that in the legal notices as well as documentation. The claim that "reasonable" would allow to require a fork to keep the logo and branding sounds like a really far stretch to me. (I'm not a lawyer though, so let's see how this continues.)

Ohh and to make the whole story even more absurd, OnlyOffice now threatens to close-down their software and not continue development under open source licenses. I guess that just proved that your understanding of what open source and community is, is borked. Open source is about collaboration on equal footing. What OnlyOffice tries to pull up, keeping everyone else in their hostage by trying to restrict how the software can be used, is contradictory to open source.

Sources:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2026/03/onlyoffice-flags-license-violations-in-euro-office-project-by-nextcloud-and-ionos