OnlyOffice Tried to Fake Open Source. It Backfired Spectacularly.

OnlyOffice, an office suite with collaboration features, added an additional term to the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) it uses which states that any fork of the software must use the OnlyOffice logo. However, no entity but the entity developing OnlyOffice is permitted to use the trademarked logo thus preventing forks of OnlyOffice and making the AGPL (a libre software license which grants users the right to make forks) a meaningless show piece.

While the AGPL does permit the addition of additional terms, it also allows users of AGPL licensed code to delete added terms which violate the terms contained in the AGPL. Requiring the use of the OnlyOffice logo violates the terms of the AGPL, so anyone who forks OnlyOffice may simply delete and ignore that requirement. A fork called Euro-Office has done exactly that.

Euro-Office is bound to be used by many of the organizations in Europe (and other places) which need to move away from Microsoft, Google, and other proprietary software companies, but I'm not a big fan of it. Euro-Office is an office suite after all, and office suites make me cringe—I refuse to use them. GNU Emacs is what I use for all tasks the majority of others complete with office suites. One function of Emacs is as my office suite, but it also functions as my web development environment, terminal emulator, file manager, organizer, notebook, password manager, IRC client, text editor, and other things. I don't use Emacs for web browsing, reading web feeds, and working with email, but I could use it for those things.

Emacs is known as a mere text editor, but in reality it is an Emacs Lisp interpreter. This reality gives individuals the ability to mold their Emacs to meet their specific needs and desires. My Emacs is not your Emacs.

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Author: Flower Snark
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