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