Recently, IONOS and Nextcloud announced their new, sovereign office suite called “Euro-Office” and claimed they were using components of ONLYOFFICE. It seems they are doing so without checking the licences first and without cooperating with them.
Original announcement:
Nextcloud and Ionos are promising a modern, open-source office suite for the summer. To achieve this goal, they have forked OnlyOffice.
ONLYOFFICE reply:
Based on publicly available information, the “Euro-Office” project uses technology derived from ONLYOFFICE editors in violation of our licensing terms and of international intellectual property law.
From the blog:
And
IDK seems to me it’s not really GPL if you can’t fork it, and that clause is certainly not compatible with any other GPL code.
If they use any GPL code they are probably in violation of that license.
Looks to me like they want to appear opensource, while keeping control of the code?
Yep there it is, this is completely contradictory to how GPL 3 works. You can’t call it GPL3 and at the same time claim the copyright.
ONLYOFFICE is completely misunderstanding how AGPL works.
Weil you can (because you still own the copyright after giving your work that license), but you have given a legally binding promise to not impose additional restrictions so it won’t do you any good to try
OK this is getting a bit hairy, but AFAIK only the creator of the GPL code maintains copyright, and can take his code to a closed source project.
BUT the code that has been released as GPL remains open source, and cannot be made to be NOT open source.
So anybody has a right to use it, as long as they keep it open source. So in the case of open source projects, it’s academic that the creator of the code maintain the right to use it without the GPL conditions.
Yes, a creator can create a closed source copy (independent of the GPL’d work), assuming they have full ownership or permission from all contributors
It’s not fully academic only because it’s common for companies to develop a GPL version and offer commercial licenses where the corporate customer is exempt
But none of this affect the users of the GPL version, so most people don’t care
You’re misunderstanding the point of AGPL.
Regular GPL software CAN be run over a network, but because the binary of the software isn’t distributed - only an interface is provided to the software itself - the host isn’t obligated to provide the source code. A lot of software hosts used this loophole to get around sharing their modifications to GPL licenced software, killing the main point.
That’s why AGPL was developed - to protect hosted software. AGPL requires the host to provide source to anyone who has access to the service, not just the binary.
GPL - if I have the binary, I must be granted access to the source
AGPL - if I can access the software, I must be granted access to the source
TIL. Thanks for the explanation.
Judging by their repo tags, they use AGPL, MIT, and Apache, with one repo sitting under BSD. But your point stands.