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got curious about the @ONLYOFFICE drama and it’s pretty funny how awful of a company onlyoffice is!
the russian owner/founder of onlyoffice did a fake open source project to extract free labor from community contributions while profiting off that unpaid labor
onlyoffice is in no way truly open source. i wouldn’t even consider it open core. many parts of the source are obfuscated or intentionally broken so you have to use their paid versions. the code is restricted through (arguably and likely unenforceable) additions on top of AGPL such as “you have to use our trademarks in any derivative work”… which would give them authority to restrict any derivatives from existence since they control licensing of their trademarks.
which hey what a coincidence that’s what they are trying to do now!! a fork, Euro-Office, are attempting to create an actual open source office suite and branched onlyoffice maintaining the AGPL license (their github goes into why they felt a branch was necessary - basically the many problematic behaviors of the russian company behind onlyoffice)
onlyoffice’s response is basically crying about being branched. yknow, a fundamental part of open source.
sorry but it’s absurd to claim to be open source and also be a little bitch about someone branching your project because it hurts your feefees and makes it harder to profit off of unpaid labor.
btw it’s pretty obvious how shit the company is just by going to the onlyoffice website. allll the hallmarks of late stage capitalism: surveillance cookies, popup ads harvesting pii, a self-obsessed old white man owner, tons of dark patterns trying to convince you self-hosting requires paying them hundreds of dollars a year.
(the last might not be misleading though, they remove functionality from the community edition over time to force paid usage. for example: they removed the ability to edit documents from mobile devices arbitrarily and without notice… but you can pay to get that functionality back!!)
great to see the Euro-Office fork push back against fake open source capitalism bullshit like onlyoffice.
rating: a++++ would rabbit hole again
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@gintoxicating onlyoffice getting mad about being forked is matt mullenweg behavior lmao
@gintoxicating@transister.social @ONLYOFFICE@fosstodon.org Yeaaa, I should consider new FOSS office suites
LibreOffice is my current alternative, even tho I dislike how it defaults to 0.8 inch margins instead of the standard 1 inch, tho I’m curious to try out EuroOffice as someone who has preferred OnlyOffice before this 
@gintoxicating while I totally agree with all of this, could I please ask that you not use the term "be a little bitch" and instead use something like "be childish"? This otherwise gives a sexist vibe unnecessarily.
@gintoxicating @ONLYOFFICE Indeed, good reflection from your part.
@gintoxicating the most flabbergasting thing about OnlyOffice to me has always been that people were using and shilling this garbage only out of ignorance.
like, people will say that its better because it looks more like MS Office but LibreOffice can look the same too. you just have to change the skin in the settings.
@gintoxicating @ONLYOFFICE While I agree with your points I feel more nuanced:
- The fork is OK but where is the community? The talent? The money to get something sustainable? The last such fork comes from Xwiki and is now 483 commits behind the master https://github.com/xwiki-labs/SaoO
- Every open source company struggles to survive with most of the time open core strategies that impedes the growth of their community. There is no easy way here.
Better talk imho
@gintoxicating @ONLYOFFICE I would've actually paid them some dollars for a mobile editor. But I'm glad I did not...
@gintoxicating @ONLYOFFICE the thing i don't get: what's wrong with libreoffice in the first place?
@luatic @gintoxicating @ONLYOFFICE for me it’s the ui. Looks like a 90s software
@luatic @gintoxicating I guess LibreOffice web version project was abandoned for a while, got partially-resurrected recently.
Might have been a better project to collaborate on indeed.
But that's from info snippets I've spotted, not quite an investigation.
@gintoxicating Thank you for your feedback on this situation. Just a few words to make our stance clear. ONLYOFFICE is open-source to use and modify, and the the only limitation is on using the ONLYOFFICE brand as your own.
As for our origin and roots, you can learn more on our blog: https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2026/04/onlyfacts-about-onlyoffice