Euro-Office Forks OnlyOffice: What It Means for Users
Home Community Fragmentation Should Not Result in Business Downtime The web office ecosystem is experiencing continued division. An eight-year partnership ended in a legal battle within just five days. This incident serves as a warning for corporate IT infrastructure. Will the tools we use today still be available tomorrow? What does stability mean in the end? In late March 2026, an announcement from Europe impacted the open source web office ecosystem. A group of European tech companies launched Euro-Office, a new product forked from ONLYOFFICE. Within five days, Ascensio System SIA, the developer of ONLYOFFICE, announced a license violation and started legal action. At the same time, another conflict is happening between The Document Foundation, which manages LibreOffice, and Collabora. To be clear, these events do not simply point to the risks of open source. The freedom to fork, community-driven development, and open standards remain values worth preserving. The problem is in the business world. However, unpredictable community splits create structural risks for companies. When transparency, vendor neutrality, and continuous support are not in place, community disputes can become a direct source of operational risk for the businesses that depend on them. The Five-Day Chain Reaction of Euro-Office March 27 A group of European tech companies officially launched Euro-Office in Berlin. This product, forked from the ONLYOFFICE code, aims for a full release in the summer of 2026. Nextcloud, a member of the group, stated that the technical parts existed for years, but a primary effort to combine them was not enough. March 30 Ascensio System, the developer of ONLYOFFICE, released an official statement alleging that Euro-Office violated license terms. The company contended that the removal of clauses regarding original logos and branding from the AGPLv3 constitutes copyright infringement. ONLYOFFICE released a legal opinion stating that the AGPLv3 must be accepted in full, including any additional conditions, and that partial compliance does not constitute a valid license. March 31 ONLYOFFICE announced the end of its eight-year partnership with Nextcloud. This partnership allowed millions of Nextcloud users to edit documents through integrated features. The Cause: License Interpretation Conflicts The legal dispute focuses on Clause 7 of the AGPLv3. Since 2021, ONLYOFFICE has included requirements to keep original logos and blocked the use of trademarks in derivative works. Euro-Office argues that logos are trademark elements and can be removed. ONLYOFFICE says these terms cannot be separated from the license. According to Clause 8, removing them terminates usage rights. Bradley M. Kuhn, the original author of the AGPL license, has been cited as supporting the Euro-Office side’s legal position. No court ruling has been issued yet. Why Euro-Office Chose to Fork The Euro-Office group noted that many ONLYOFFICE developers are based in Russia. They argued this limits use by European public institutions. They also claimed that community contributions were ignored and some code was hidden, which made international cooperation difficult. These points reflect technical complaints and issues of geopolitical trust. The Incidents That Have Already Happened Somewhere in Your Stack The Euro-Office case is not a sudden event. Patterns of unpredictable governance and community splits have affected corporate infrastructure time and again. When Governance Becomes Unpredictable OpenOffice ↔ LibreOffice (2010) Sun Microsystems, the developer of OpenOffice, was bought by Oracle in 2010. Concerns over technical policies under Oracle led developers to form The Document Foundation. They launched LibreOffice as a fork of OpenOffice. Companies using OpenOffice faced confusion. Facing uncertain support and updates, businesses had to choose between replacing their systems or keeping unstable tools. MySQL ↔ MariaDB (2010) The purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle also affected MySQL. Concerns about monopolies led the creator of MySQL to start MariaDB. Many companies using MySQL had to decide whether to stay or switch. This case showed how governance uncertainty could change the global IT environment. CentOS 8 EOL (2020) In 2020, Red Hat moved the end-of-support date for CentOS 8 from 2029 to late 2021. Companies that moved to CentOS 8 for its promised ten-year support had to move their infrastructure again. Businesses had to choose between other versions like Rocky Linux or switching to paid RHEL. For companies that had planned around a decade of support, the sudden change left little room to respond. License and Partnership Disputes Terraform ↔ OpenTofu (2023) This conflict started when HashiCorp changed the Terraform license from an open source license (MPL) to a business source license (BSL). Developers who built businesses on Terraform reacted by creating OpenTofu. IT managers again had to choose: keep existing code or move to the new open source project. LibreOffice ↔ Collabora (2026) Collabora, a partner of The Document Foundation, provided a commercial product based on LibreOffice Online. In 2025, Collabora released a desktop version without the LibreOffice brand. In response, the foundation said it would resume development of LibreOffice Online in February 2026. Collabora called this move destructive, and the foundation took action by terminating the membership status of over 30 developers associated with Collabora. This event damaged a long relationship built on trust. Shared Problems in These Cases Comparing the Euro-Office case with these five cases reveals common issues: What risks come from division caused by distrust in governance? (OpenOffice/LibreOffice) Does the business keep control over its tools? (MySQL/MariaDB) How easily can supplier decisions break service continuity? (CentOS 8) How do conflicts over license interpretations split the ecosystem? (Terraform/OpenTofu) What crises do open source conflicts bring to business customers? (LibreOffice/Collabora) When governance lacks stability and clear accountability, commercial and strategic risks grow. As these risks reach a breaking point, the damage falls on the companies using the tools and their customers. Checklist: Solution Stability Audit Use this list to check the office solutions your company uses or plans to buy. Check each item to help reduce risks after adoption. 1. Governance Transparency □ Are support policies and major changes clearly told to customers? □ Is the long-term survival of the operator confirmed? □ Is there a way for customer feedback to improve the product? 2. Geopolitical Risk and Data