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Casablanca – Just days after Euro-Office was announced by IONOS and Nextcloud as a European open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, the project is now facing a public licensing dispute with ONLYOFFICE, which says the suite reuses its editor technology without complying with attribution and branding requirements.
The disagreement is not about whether Euro-Office can legally build on open-source code. All parties agree that the editor technology is based on open-source software released under the GNU AGPLv3 license, which allows reuse and modification.
The dispute is over what must stay attached to that code after it is reused.
In comments to Morocco World News (MWN), ONLYOFFICE Commercial Director Galina Goduhina said Euro-Office appears, based on publicly available information, to directly reuse ONLYOFFICE code with only minimal modifications, while removing original logos and product identity elements.
Goduhina added that the core problem is not the fork itself, which the company says it accepts as a normal part of open-source development, but what she described as rebranding that conceals the software’s original source.
According to her, users should still be clearly informed that the technology is based on ONLYOFFICE, and required attribution elements such as branding should remain in place where the license requires it. She also said the company has not been credited in public communications around the launch.
Goduhina added that ONLYOFFICE has already reached out to the parties involved but has not yet received what it considers a meaningful response. The company says it remains open to dialogue.
Read also: ‘Euro-Office’ Launches as Europe’s Sovereign Alternative to Microsoft Office
Nextcloud, however, strongly disputes that legal reading. In a statement to MWN, Co-founder and VP Communications and Product Strategy Jos Poortvliet said forks are central to open-source software and are specifically intended to allow customization and alternative governance.
He said Euro-Office’s legal reasoning has been published in the project’s public repository and added that the Free Software Foundation shares this interpretation. He also said Bradley M. Kuhn, the creator of the AGPL, supports Nextcloud’s legal assessment “100%.”
IONOS has backed this position. Head of Public Relations Andreas Maurer told MWN the company believes Euro-Office already meets the license’s main obligations because the modified source code is publicly available and directly accessible to users.
Maurer added that guidance from the Free Software Foundation suggests Section 7(b) attribution rules do not extend to logos or hyperlinks, which sit at the heart of the dispute.
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