Technology ONLYOFFICE Gets Forked as "Made in Europe", Sparks Licensing and Trust Debate

[lokamoka820]

Content source

https://itsfoss.com/news/onlyoffice-forked/

There is a new open source office suite. It’s called Euro-Office.

As the name suggests, it is a European effort and is primarily meant for European organizations and governments.

Before you get too excited, let me clarify that it is not your typical office suite like LibreOffice that you install on desktop systems. It is designed more for providing collaborative document portals for organizations.

In other words, it’s an online office suite that can be deployed within an organization and accessed via the web. It can also be integrated into other products, like Nextcloud to provide document editing capabilities.

The project has been initiated by Nextcloud and IONOS. Nextcloud is a well-known open source collaboration platform, and IONOS is primarily a server infrastructure provider.

 

[Halp2001]

Thanks for sharing this news.

What we are seeing here is not just a technical fork, but a geopolitical statement about digital sovereignty and trust. Euro‑Office positions itself as a "transparent and European" alternative, while ONLYOFFICE has already alleged a license violation (AGPLv3) due to the removal of branding and attribution.

This creates a real dilemma for the community: Does the "Made in Europe" label automatically grant more trust, even if the project starts with a serious legal dispute?

 

[TairikuOkami]

ONLYOFFICE is a Russian company (despite many attempts to hide this), and nearly all developers reside in Russia. Open Source is a global effort, but current political situation makes collaboration hard and trust difficult to earn. Especially when development is not transparent and open.

They do not trust their open source, so they copy their entire code and make other "unknown" changes on top. OK, makes sense, from their perspective anyway.

Euro-Office liberates the ONLYOFFICE code base​

I can not help, but I read it like: We steal the code and make it our own, but for a good cause. Why does it sound familiar, like some country liberating another in 2019.

Does the "Made in Europe" label automatically grant more trust,

Considering the current state of the world, As far as the privacy goes (not security), US/EU citizens are better off using RU/CN products and vice versa. Agencies do not share.

 

[LinuxFan58]

That said, I will move to Euro-Office when it launches, because I hope they will fix the annoying bugs in Only Office.

 

[Zero Knowledge]

Considering the current state of the world, As far as the privacy goes (not security), US/EU citizens are better off using RU/CN products and vice versa. Agencies do not share.

Privacy wise maybe using RN/CN is better, but security wise hell NO. It's suicidal if you ask me. If I worked anywhere close or in a major corporation or government I wouldn't be caught dead using any products from those countries. It's just common sense if your giving sound advice to people, nothing against those countries though .