OnlyOffice kills Nextcloud partnership for forking its project without approval
by bundie on 4/1/2026, 2:11:58 PM
Comments
by: 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.
4/1/2026, 3:11:42 PM
by: AdmiralAsshat
If "forking without approval" is grounds for some kind of termination, then the project should probably not be considered truly "open source".
4/1/2026, 3:15:39 PM
by: 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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/core/blob/master/LICENSE.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/core/blob/master/LICENSE.txt</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/onlyoffice-nextcloud/blob/master/LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/onlyoffice-nextcloud/blob/mast...</a>
4/1/2026, 3:48:54 PM
by: 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?
4/1/2026, 3:32:30 PM
by: 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.
4/1/2026, 4:04:39 PM
by: jimnotgym
Wow, how to alienate everyone.
4/1/2026, 4:12:00 PM
by: spacedoutman
They should have used malus.sh instead
4/1/2026, 3:58:23 PM
by: gunalx
Only onlyoffice being petty. A good reason to use LibreOffice or Collabora instead.
4/1/2026, 3:30:14 PM
by: davisr
Hey mods/dang, can you put this back on the front page please? No reason to bounce it. Important licensing discussion and relevant!
4/1/2026, 4:46:28 PM