OnlyOffice kills Nextcloud partnership for forking its project without approval

bundie 58 points 83 comments April 01, 2026
www.neowin.net · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (11 comments)

c-hendricks

Seems onlyoffice is "unforkable"? It's AGPL but has extra restrictions: you're required to show their logo but they don't give out rights for others to use their logo.

AdmiralAsshat

If "forking without approval" is grounds for some kind of termination, then the project should probably not be considered truly "open source".

gunalx

Only onlyoffice being petty. A good reason to use LibreOffice or Collabora instead.

t0mas88

Isn't the whole idea behind AGPL that you're allowed to fork and modify it as long as you provide your modified source code to the users?

MadVikingGod

I was wondering about how they came to the conclusion that they violated the copyright, so I went to check if they did the AGPL[1] with some extra clauses in it. Turns out they didn't, but they did change[2] it[3] in an interesting way: All the https urls in the GNU version are http urls. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt [2]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/core/blob/master/LICENSE.txt [3]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/onlyoffice-nextcloud/blob/mast...

spacedoutman

They should have used malus.sh instead

dotdi

Important bit of information is further down in the article: OnlyOffice is Russian. I would therefore view any collaboration as a risk. It's not adequate for strategic reasons as well as sovereignty.

jimnotgym

Wow, how to alienate everyone.

davisr

Hey mods/dang, can you put this back on the front page please? No reason to bounce it. Important licensing discussion and relevant!

maxnoe

There is a section in the GitHub Readme of Eurooffice with a justification of the fork: https://github.com/Euro-Office#euro-office-liberates-the-onl...

627467

An example of how european "tech" reacts to threats. 2 european open source projects in litigation with each other and one of them engineered a license to prevent an obvious feature of open source software (forking) while the other is throwing shades at opacity and geopolitical control at the first.

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