OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools | Hacker News Reader

OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

github.com

232 pointsNicoJuicy239 comments

I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. It’s AGPL, open source, and almost infinitely more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office.

Are the desktop apps open source too? I have a faint memory of only their document server being open source or something like that.

Sure are.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

The headless server is Apache, the client and visual elements AGPL, which might be the confusion.

Could the offline editor interface with the online editor? Would be handy for a hybrid approach for reliability purposes.

I don’t believe that they have very much proprietary code. I know that if you spin up their document server “community edition,” it has a limit of 20 simultaneous users without a support subscription.

This, however, can easily be legally patched around. It’s more just to make a point that it’s not supported without talking to them about a proper deployment. They also might have some code that is proprietary to make that large deployment easier, but it’s not required as long as you don’t mind the AGPL.

You can actually try this yourself with their NextCloud plugin. LibreOffice also has a cloud version available but it’s… let’s just say, in my opinion, it’s very bad.

You can open documents stored online in the desktop editors but there’s no offline syncing or anything so it effectively just opens a browser tab

Oh nice!

Thanks, your comments convinced me to finally download and apt install

> I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. It’s AGPL, open source, and almost infinitely more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office.

As someone who doesn't even know MS Office well enough to know what I'm missing, what's unintuitive about LibreOffice to someone who knows MS Office?

Looks like OnlyOffice uses a ribbon UI that looks to be pretty well modeled on the MS Office pattern. Somewhat better preservation of muscle memory.

I am not saying that Libreoffice has a worse interface (or really 'unintuitive').. Just more different from MS Office.

LibreOffice also offers one that's fairly decent, just not enabled by default. It has many other modes as well: https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/01/Enable-ribbon-tab...

It's quite intuitive if you learned on Office '97 or anything up to '07. If you learned on '07+, you might want a ribbon interface instead. But LO has that available; not sure how good it is.

My only serious gripe with OnlyOffice is that when opening a CSV, you have to choose an encoding and delimiter, and there is no way to set a default. You must click twice, in two places, every single time you open a CSV.

You have to do this with Excel as well to avoid your data automagically being formatted and/or truncated.

So true... opening a CSV in Excel is like playing the lottery. Sometimes it opens fine, sometimes not, it even depends on the character encoding of the CSV and whether you double-click the file, open it or drag it inside Excel. Sometimes you get the "import text file" window where you have to choose the delimiter, sometimes everything gets in a single column, and sometimes you get what you want.

CSV is not a standard (rfc4180 exists but only very few things actually pay attention to it) so no behavior is a sane behavior when trying to import it.

You sound like a C compiler. "This is technically undefined behavior so whatever" is not a useful guiding principle for user interfaces.

A normal user interface would guide you away from using CSV in the first place.

In almost all situations where one could use CSV, a better, more structured, more standards-compliant, more optimized file format (like a SQLite database) would be a better choice.

In situations where people are opening a CSV file in an office-suite spreadsheet app, they probably didn't generate the data themselves. Lecturing them about how their spreadsheet should have been a database isn't likely to help, and describing SQLite's file format, which is well-documented but not a standard, as "more standards-compliant" than a file format with an actual RFC is bordering on ridiculous.

The Library of Congress, an agency of the legislative branch of the U.S. government thinks that SQLite3 [1] is a acceptable database format.

The Library of Congress has a small amount of SQLite files in its collections.

The Library of Congress also cites CSV [2], Comma Separated Values, as strictly specified in RFC 4180 as a acceptable dataset format. No other types of free-form CSV that aren't variants compliant with 4180 are accepted, and it also says that documentation and metadata needs to be supplied with additional separated archives in supported data formats.

The Library of Congress has 0 CSVs in its collections, and as a result no experience actually handling it.

I believe that if a widespread format such as CSVs have 0 files added to a reasonably well known and encompassing collection of human artifacts related to culture even with its ubiquity, it's a telltale sign that it isn't a standard at all.

[1] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0004...

[2] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0003...

This is all completely irrelevant. No office suite user gives a shit what the Library of Congress thinks about database formats, because spreadsheets are not databases, no matter how often you personally conflate the two.

Furthermore, the LoC's job is archiving. Your links have "preservation" in the url for a reason, and "preservation" is not what people do with spreadsheets. To strive for relevance, explore https://data.gov, where CSV is abundant, because it's in use by literally hundreds of state and federal agencies, often by people using spreadsheet software, and will continue to be so for years or decades to come, whether you understand why or not.

edit: Your assertions are wrong anyway, as the LoC does indeed have CSV artifacts in its collection. It is most often in a Zip file and catalogued as "compressed data," which is probably why your perfunctory search did not unearth it. Some random counterexamples to your claim:

https://www.loc.gov/item/2022482299/

https://www.loc.gov/item/2020446966/

https://www.loc.gov/item/2023590205/

https://www.loc.gov/item/2018655320/

> This is all completely irrelevant. No office suite user gives a shit what the Library of Congress thinks about database formats, because spreadsheets are not databases, no matter how often you personally conflate the two.

I did not conflate database and dataset. I specifically described the two types. The Library of Congress specifically describes the two types.

You decided that "others" think that database and dataset are conflated, and that they are wrong.

> edit: Your assertions are wrong anyway (...) Some random counterexamples to your claim:

It's not my assertion, it's a assertion by the Library of Congress itself. The Library declares that it has no experience directly handling CSV.

> "LC experience or existing holdings": None in relation to collection holdings [1]

> "LC experience or existing holdings": "Report of actual practice at the Library of Congress." [2]

[1] CSV, Comma Separated Values (RFC 4180) - https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0003...

[2] Format Descriptions: Explanation of Terms, Local Use - https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd_exp...

This will be my last response to you, since you seem to be ignoring actual points and veering into irrelevant pedantry, which is not particularly helpful to anyone. But because you keep structuring your posts with links in pursuit of a veneer of credibility, like some kind of reverse-Batesian mimicry, wherein something toxic might mimic something palatable in order to lure unsuspecting consumers, I will summarize for the benefit of our readers.

You asserted that "In almost all situations where one could use CSV" there would be a better choice, and suggested a database format. Aside from weasel words like "almost" making the statement inapplicable, the assertion itself is impracticable, for the reason I discussed, viz. in most situations where one is using CSV, one did not choose the format. Nothing you have said (or, I speculate, can say) contradicts this central point.

Your blathering about the Library of Congress is completely useless, since you appear to extract from a specific datum (the Library of Congress preservationists reporting no preferential experience with the format in relation to their collection) the irrelevant misinformation "The Library of Congress has 0 CSVs in its collections," which has a remarkable combination of qualities, i.e. not only does it have no bearing on the topic of this thread, it is also a lie, or at the very least a mistake borne of an inability or unwillingness to read the text you keep linking.

So in conclusion, nothing you have contributed to this discussion is of use to any office suite user while considering the ease of opening CSV files, and even if the information you have provided were of any utility value, it's not reliable. Congratulations on a perfect record, then, of not helping. I hope for the sake of those around you that your skills at identifying relevance and pursuing accuracy increase markedly and quickly.

I've just tried opening csv in LibreOffice and it asked me for it too. However sane options were already selected so it was just one additional click.

There is some confusion here.

The linked GitHub repo clearly says Apache License, but their commercial website does say AGPL. They're not even remotely similar.

The AGPL is regarded as so toxic that nearly all companies where office suites matter, place it on a "do not use" list. It's a good way to artificially limit your potential customers. It doesn't matter that they have a page saying "sure go ahead and use it internally" - most places won't touch it with a 10m pole, by policy.

The document server is Apache, but the editors and visual components are AGPL.

That’s so sad. I’d hate to work at a shop that wouldn’t allow AGPL’d software for internal tooling. What a completely legally unnecessary, productivity-hobbling decision.

Perhaps the best feature of the AGPL is that it predominately hampers companies with ineffective legal departments.

One of the most notable examples is Google.

Pity. They said it’s because they’re afraid someone outside Google would use it, which is legitimate for companies without sufficient technical SBOL controls to prevent using third party software in violation of its terms. Their take is basically “we don’t have a way to keep our internal software internal, so you can’t use it at all, ever, for anything”. I wouldn’t have expected that of them.

That makes sense. GPL 3 is basically a non-starter for people that ship hardware, but is fine for people that provide web services.

AGPL would level the playing field between Google and device manufacturers and on-prem software companies (like Apple and Microsoft).

Of course they don’t want their employees to use and indirectly support that ecosystem!

I wish they’d produce a GPL 4 that is closer to the AGPL. v3 backfired and is severely hurting end-users’ freedom in practice.

I know, but why?

Due to their size, they must have one of the best legal department in the world. Also, their core business is search, and data processing in general. They have the means of using such software and doing what it takes to comply with the licence without putting themselves in trouble.

My guess is simply that they don't want to. They prefer to rewrite it, which will allow them to monetize their tools as proprietary software later. They are already overstaffed with some of the best developers, they can rewrite stuff, and they don't really need help from the open source community, that's why they don't release under copyleft themselves.

Licenses intended to be viral and poisonous are avoided by companies interested in ownership over their own IP. Huge shocker.

What do you mean by "poisonous"?

It's just a classic F.U.D (fear, uncertainty and doubt) tactic

They are intentionally dangerous to unwitting license holders who wield them wrong.

I suppose it's about the patent clause.

> viral and poisonous

Viral, perhaps if you integrate a library, but in this case it doesn't make sense, you only need to distribute source code if you modify it. Poisonous makes no sense to me, can you clarify?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poisonous

1. DESTRUCTIVE, HARMFUL

...

3. SPITEFUL, MALICIOUS

In what ways is the GPL or AGPL destructive or harmful or spiteful or malicious? I find it the exact opposite of all those concepts.

It’s not, except to people who want to use GPLed software without holding up their end of the bargain.

Can they hurt you if you accidentally use them without understanding the consequences?

Hmm, it sounds to me like so much of our world is poison, then. Most surveillance-capitalism software (so the bulk of the most popular websites) are for example poisonous then, no? Unless you'd like to argue that unintentionally turning yourself into a research subject isn't really harmful, in which case I argue accidentally using a license that requires you to share any licensed code you change to also not really be harmful.

You can do whatever you want with your code, you just really shouldn't act surprised when people avoid it so it can't hurt them. They don't see the tradeoff as being worth it. Maybe they don't in the other cases you are presenting as "poisonous" but in those situations they either aren't aware that it's posoin or they are aware and think that it's worth the tradeoff. Regardless, businesses have pretty much universally decided to avoid. I think that speaks volumes.

> Regardless, businesses have pretty much universally decided to avoid. I think that speaks volumes.

I don't typically make my decisions based on what businesses "universally decide" (have they actually?). Most businesses are shareholder or private corporations that find margin between labor and sales; I instead structured a business as a co-op and that seems to be working just fine. Many businesses profit off polluting the environment or selling weapons; I've never worked DoD or O&G (and never will) and lead an extraordinarily comfortable and privileged life regardless. Many content creator businesses lock their content behind paywalls, riddle their sites with ads and tracking; I put up a simple blog in html and css and my audience might be small but they are engaged and are in conversation with me.

I'm not trying to say i'm a special ethical snowflake that's better than everyone else, I'm saying I don't really take it as a given that "businesses doing things in a certain" way really means much of anything at all. In fact I've found often profit correlates with harm (and that businesses often make decisions that don't lead to long, long-term profits but rather pillage themselves for short-term profits), O&G being a great example, so I might even be able to take "businesses do it that way" as a warning to not do it that way or I might be hurting people.

I think you're taking my criticism of the license as an indictment of your personal licensing decisions. I don't really have a problem with you licensing your software the way you choose to. You mainly seem to take issue with the word "poison", that's how I see these licenses, but it was never intended to be about the morality of using them. I'm also not talking about whether businesses are being moral in their other practices unrelated to licensing, I am just saying it's NOT shocking or surprising that they avoid potentially harmful (to them) licenses even if they could maybe save money by doing so. Even if you think that they AREN'T harmful (to the businesses) that's clearly not the perception they have, otherwise companies are leaving free money on the table which I doubt most informed companies are willing to do.

I don't care to continue the conversation where you justify your actions to me, it's just not necessary. I just wish we would stop acting like it's confusing or we don't understand why businesses respond the way that they do when confronted with the decision to use AGPL software.

Maybe it's just a messaging/marketing problem, I don't know.

If you don't distribute the program you don't need to care that it's built with GPL dependencies.

The entire point of the AGPL is to close this 'hole.' The AGPL is not the GPL.

Ah I missed it was AGPL

Totally bollocks.

This is pure fud. Nothing else.

AGPL DOES NOT restrict ability to be used internally. Agpl does NOT restrict selling software as it is.

Agpl does not restrict using agpl software with proprietary software.

Only thing that agpl prevent is, IF YOU MODIFY AGPL SOFTWARE, YOU HAVE TO GIVE SOURCE CODE TO USERS. Your modifications. Thats it.

AGPL DOES NOT MANDATE upstreaming modifications. You can do it or you cannot. Your choice. Others can choose to upstream or fork or Downstream your modifications

What you are confusing with is the fud google spreads about agpl. They dont touch it because if they modify code they have to release it but they don't for reasons known to them.

Again, AGPL is NOT viral like SSPL which is like AGPL but on steroids.

And the weirdest part about the complaint is that this is an application your employees could run on their computers to write documents. It's not like the discussion is about a library or package to be included in the product you're shipping.

Yeah. I challenge people here to break my claims down point by point from agpl license.

I could be wrong but let's see how wrong I really am.

With large companies with 100s of partners and contractors what is internal is fluid particularly over the network. So am sure they don't want to use such as a library.

Though I am not lawyer/license expert so that fact may be irrelevant more so using it as desktop app. But perception matters, if Goog/MSFT are not using it, a startup also won't risk using them lest some auditor flags it in next round of funding particularly if alternative is few dollars a month.

The software in question is an end product, like microsoft office.

>lest some auditor flags it in next round of funding

i am an auditor and a laywer, so what is there to flag? please enlighten me.

This is the AGPL, not the GPL. The AGPL may be based on the GPL but it is different, and has nothing to do with the Free Software Foundation.

Basically, you if you provide this software as a service to your customers, you are required to let them access the source code and modifications.

The AGPLv3, which OnlyOffice uses, is a FSF license.

>Basically, you if you provide this software as a service to your customers, you are required to let them access the source code and modifications.

the source code of "this" software and any modifications you made. so.... whats the problem?

Be is it may, there are companies like iText (Java PDF library) which are actively harassing companies which use their software, even if the use is perfectly legal (e.g. internal server software). So it's not only Google spreading FUD but companies which try to use AGPL as a trojan horse and then strong-arm users into commercial licenses.

The problem with AGPL is, that the definitions are very open to interpretation. What is a network, how many systems do have to be between to the end user and the software component to still count as "interacting over a network", etc.

So I would also not recommend to use AGPL in your company...

Please make your substantive points without fulminating or calling names. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. In addition, it's in your own interest because it will make your argument much more persuasive.

Edit: we've had to ask you this at least once before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32387908. Can you please stick to the rules when posting here? We have to ban accounts that won't, and I don't want to ban you.

> The AGPL is regarded as so toxic that nearly all companies where office suites matter, place it on a "do not use" list. It's a good way to artificially limit your potential customers.

Then it's no worse than any proprietary software; if they pay for a commercial license then it's fine. Of course, if they use it internally then AGPL is also fine.

I think that’s why they have a commercial offering

I hear the company owner is a russian citizen. Maybe that is a problem.

The company has quite some links to Russia. Until recently it was owned by a Russian company but headquartered in Riga, now they seems to have moved the headquarters in Singapore according to this Wikipedia edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/117266616... (which I'm not sure I can trust completely as there as been multiple attempt to remove any mention of Russia on that page)

But if I had to guess, the major development effort is still done in Russia.

> I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions.

There's an RFP/ITP (Request For Package/Intent To Package) issue for Debian filed in June 2020, but no evidence that any DDs have wanted to pick it up or start working on it. I guess LibreOffice works well enough for all of them that need it.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=963070

> It's [...] more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office.

I've just had a look at some of the OnlyOffice screenshots, and they mostly look like it has a Ribbon-style interface. It might be that Debian devs are mostly old-school enough that LibreOffice's classic menu and toolbars is more similar to the MS Office they used to use than a Ribbon.

That said, LibreOffice does have multiple User Interface variants (accessible from the "View" menu in the standard UI), including a "Tabbed" option that is Ribbon-like if that's more your thing. (And some others, but I've not explored them much.)

Anyone have a good comparison between this and LibreOffice?

Only Office can run in a cloud-based capacity. Think Office 365 that is able to be self-hosted.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...

There have been various efforts to bring LibreOffice to the web, but I haven’t tested anything in a long time, so I can’t say if it works well.

They work quite well, I've been using it (Collabora + "richdocuments" in Nextcloud) for a number of years now.

Why would you want to?

One reason is that it’s more convenient to use on computers you don’t own and can’t install software on, and other is you can share things with people without them needing to install it to view or edit your documents

OK, the first one I can understand. The second one... installing an open-source package that runs on almost everything doesn't seem like that big a deal.

But those are reasonable answers. I would rather see engineering effort go into fixing bugs in the suite, but I realize that the people volunteering to "Web-enable" the software aren't necessarily the ones who'd be fixing unrelated bugs.

You can also self-host Office: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeonlineserver/office-...

The protocol that connects the office suite to the file sharing platform is called WOPI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Open_Platform_...). OneDrive/Dropbox/Nextcloud all seem to support it.

Seems like Collabora and OnlyOffice are the two big players right now.

OnlyOffice seems to be the only FOSS office suite that handles Microsoft Office documents correctly.

When I open my Word docs in LibreOffice, they still look significantly different than in Word after all these years. In OnlyOffice they look exactly like in Word. So it replaced Word-in-Wine for me.

The elephant in the room is excel not word IMO.

So how does OnlyOffice's Excel replacement compare?

in my recent (less than a year ago) experiments both struggled with excel files in different ways (some content missing), so can't be trusted as a drop-in-replacement, at least not for already existing documents.

> OnlyOffice seems to be the only FOSS office suite that handles Microsoft Office documents correctly.

I remember also looking at WPS Office for this and it seemed mostly okay to me: https://www.wps.com/office/ (though no source code available, at least it doesn't seem so)

Then again, LibreOffice feels like the most trustworthy option out there for me (and is the default in many Linux distros), so I ended up just using that, any drawbacks and all. Nowadays I use LibreOffice on all my computers and have basically gotten rid of MS Office altogether. If I ever need to send someone something that looks consistent across all devices, there's PDF/A.

I've actually used PDFs for presentations as well with no issues, especially after the inconsistencies of LibreOffice Impress and PowerPoint made one of my past presentations look like an utter mess on someone else's computer (fonts/locations were all wrong).

> When I open my Word docs in LibreOffice, they still look significantly different than in Word after all these years.

Huh, I've not had that issue with the documents I've worked with in the best part of a decade.

What is it that's different for you? Page layout, text wrapping/length, image support, table formatting? Something else?

What platform are you using, and if you're not on Windows do you have the equivalent-metric Liberation font families installed so that docs which rely on non-redistributable proprietary Microsoft fonts can be rendered properly?

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/09/08/libreoff...

Even a Times New Roman doc or one that bundles its fonts won't render right. It's pretty bad, actually - it was only really fixed by MS allowing saving as ODT.

For what it's worth, my wife just finished her Master's thesis using this suite, she had very little adjustment time needed moving from Word.

When I used OnlyOffice (2020-ish, shipped default with Manjaro), it was really laggy and buggy and barely opened. I don't know if it's better now, since most of my work is on the browser GSuite

I tried to work with OnlyOffice for most of spreadsheet, the only drawback is long-loading time whenever you open a file compare to Microsoft Office web based I can get on Koofr cloud storage for free and get the best of both world.

When I need to fill PDF form, Microsoft Edge could work fine.

My experience is exact opposite. I use OnlyOffice as default tool to open office documents because it's blinding fast on Linux( home systems) and macos (work). I don't need 98% of the features in MS Office so OnlyOffice has just what I want. And a brilliant integration with draw.io which makes documentation a breeze.

I did not know was a Russian company so shall now rethink my use.

Most of us don't need 80% of the featured in MS Office too, until I realize it cost less than 15USD to get full office suite for our business, make sense for business.

But wow, I didn't knew OnlyOffice is manage by company in Singapore where I live.

Do you have demo with React at https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/document-editor-react ? Seems promising !

Wasn't expecting to like it when I clicked the link, but it doesn't look bad at all. Interesting that it's written in C#.

Only missing a real Outlook competitor (EWS).

[flagged]

not in any way

The article from the link does not provide any evidence to support the statement "The Company however is russian". Does anyone else have any info on this accusation?

Original link (without Translate): https://www.epravda.com.ua/publications/2022/07/6/688888/

Excerpt via Google translate, though the whole thing might be worth a read via Google translate or ChatGPT or whatnot:

> The majority of OnlyOffice employees are citizens of Russia who are in this country or hold positions in the Latvian and Russian offices at the same time.

> The developers of OnlyOffice in the Russian information space emphasize that the Latvian Ascensio System SIA is a one hundred percent daughter and one hundred percent property of the Russian company NKT. The open database of Lursoft companies registered in Latvia also points to a Russian beneficiary.

Google translate: https://www-epravda-com-ua.translate.goog/publications/2022/... via Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/10nqq8m/onlyoffice...

I had no clue

I don't know, let me use my Cisco switch to browse internet which was disassembled at FBI.

Be sure to put it behind a palo alto firewall which is by no means backdoored by the IDF!

Glad to see some based people here.

Not every russian works in the Kremlin.

No, but 4 out of 5 Russians dig[1] their dictator[2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...

[2] https://pace.coe.int/en/news/9191/pace-committee-examines-th...

Official statistics in Russia don't mean anything anymore unfortunately

Even worse: it's used as propoganda itself, they export this idea of all russians being united against the west bla-bla-bla. While in reality most people just don't want to think about it, and the state does everything to keep the "normality level" acceptable. This may sound unrealistic to the americans who seems to have their political opinion all the time, but russians just don't care, there're even jokes about "not interested in politics", not even if it threatens their lifes

[flagged]

I don't read it as exactly whitewashing Russians. Embracing passivity is also a choice.

Almost all the Russians I know personally support the war. They aren’t some silly ‘90 years olds with Alzheimer’s’ crowd, most of them are software engineers. Some of them know I live in Ukraine, yet they tell me they will ‘liberate me soon.’ From my own free will, I suppose.

The ones I know all oppose the war. I suspect yours may be more representative though...

We cannot draw a legitimate statistics, as that could be our own bubble. But it’s incorrect to say an average Joe doesn’t support the war. Even those who oppose the war, do they do something? Or do they like ‘I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can (want to) do.’

Keep asking them why, they will normally fail after a couple of back and forth.

"liberate us? Why", we are more free here in Ukraine.

Follow up would be: are you free enough to be against the war?

Why did so many Russians flee?

Etc...

Ps. Good luck... It's cruel what is happening now.

Oh no, those who are ideological won’t fail quickly. It’s not that you show them there is no logic and they change their minds. It’s more like absolutely controversial realtors would peacefully coexist next to each other in their heads. The same way those conspiracy fanatics do.

It depends.

A lot of times they are stuck with the recurring why loop.

Same with the conspiracy theorists.

Tbg. Sometimes they do find a farfetched reason that actually makes sense somehow.

The normal rule is that it's too farfetched by then. And you could just say: do you realize how crazy that sounds? What if it's "just" .... x.

Eg. for Elon Musk. He probably believes that Russia would nuke and he's just scared.

Or his business in China is at stake. Which means he's getting hated in the West for something he will already lose in the future...

Simple > conspiracy theory

Apart from the questionable nature of polling in a totalitarian dictatorship there's also the question of propaganda and lies making people support things they shouldn't.

The Iraq War being the go to example of the West.

From what I've heard, Levada Center statistics are generally considered accurate.

What's next? Not every ru passport holder is evil orc? :)

But every russian supports the war direct or indirect.

"If you're not with me you're against me"?

People/companies pay tax, so every products that get bought from russian companies is part of the war.

If someone sees a smorgasbord of heinous crimes [0] and doesn't speak out against it then them are supporting it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_inva...

That's redefining "support" to mean something completely different. You'll get in a lot of pointless fights if you don't make it clear to people you're using an obscure definition.

You don’t need to work in Kremlin to support the unjustified war.

They try hard to whitewash their affiliations to russia for potential customers while still not condemning the war. Jetbrains at least had the courage to do so even though state-owned institutions in germany are checking to cut their ties even with them. I would strictly advise against using their (OnlyOffice) products if you're in a country (eu, america) that participates in the sanctions against russia.

"I would strictly advise against using their products if you're in a country (eu, america) that participates in the sanctions against russia." What is the exact meaning or "their" here: OnlyOffice or JetBrains?

I can only say so for OnlyOffice and i've edited my comment.

Jetbrains is Czech, not Russian.

Things get a bit more complicated when the founders are russian and had R&D offices in russia. To my knowledge they claimed to have cut all financial ties to russia and they also positioned themselves publicly against the war.

Watch out there are russian immigrants founding companies all over the place! Some of them have name Sergei. USA is even trying to attract those russian kids on purpose! What a conspiracy.

The google founders are american citizens.

> Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow in the Soviet Union

> The Brin family lived in Vienna and Paris while Mikhail Brin secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland with help from Anatole Katok. During this time, the Brin family received support and assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They arrived in the United States on October 25, 1979.

He is an immigrant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

Yes, he is an immigrant but he is no longer a russian citizen. That is the whole point.

If he can be trusted to be an "American" as a naturalised citizen, why does America bar a naturalised citizen from becoming the President? (The US constitution bars naturalised citizens from contesting in the Presidential poll).

Because the Constitution was written hundreds of years ago by people who were afraid a foreign interest would subvert their nascent state?

So why hasn't that been revised 200+ years later?

Because nobody has cared enough.

Condemning the war while being inside Russia poses grave risks to personal safety. Surely they are a software outfit, not noble heroic knights.

I don't know how i would have acted in their toes but i think i would still be held morally responsible if i just say that politics is none of my business because i'm the head of a software shop while my country is trying to annex a neighbour.

When the US illegally invaded Iraq, if I remember well people's reaction was to rename French fries to Freedom fries. I don't remember any business condemning the war.

If the parent comment wasn't clear enough, the consequence for openly criticizing the government in Russia is death. Demanding that others be a martyr while you stay safe from harm is a bit too much, don't you think?

Iirc, the sentence is more like 5 years in prison than death.

Get too much attention and it'll turn into extrajudicial killing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_Russian_b...

Ah, indeed - can't be too high-profile. I watch candid interviews of random Russians on the street fairly frequently, and the fear of the sentence is nearly ubiquitous.

It’s strictly illegal for them to directly criticize the war, with potentially severe penalties.

Not more than or less than using American or Israeli products.

Comparing America to a nation engaging in an invasion is a bit far fetched. Not saying the US has a clean sheet but it's still a land of freedom.

Do you know about your own country ? It's a perfectly legitimate comparison to make

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Invasions_by_the_Unit...

It's an entire category.

When was the last time the US attacked a nation to annex them into their sovereignty? Not in some abstract or vague manner, directly annexing them.

Not defending any of the US' wars, but it's a little disingenuous to compare them to the Ukrainian conflict.

>When was the last time the US attacked a nation to annex them into their sovereignty?

So invading and bombing other countries is now fine as long as you don't annex them? Good to know that's how far the goalposts have moved.

It makes more sense if you view america as a police officer. An officer would pull sometimes his weapon to prevent bad things from happening but the officer would never take the suspect as his personal slave like russia.

>It makes more sense if you view america as a police officer.

That's an absolutely insane comparison.

Police are funded from your taxes to protect you. Countries haven't paid taxes tot he US to come invade/drone strike them.

In your country, do police officers from other countries routinely break into your house to tear it up, steal your shit and beat you up for doing nothing? Sounds more like criminals than police.

It's a more nuanced issue. Roméo Dallaire would have to say something about it.

Well, it happens:

https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/incident/chinese-serbian...

Police in the United States have conducted airstrikes on civilian homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

Much like a police officer would never rape women? The U.S. would like to be named world-police, however, that is mostly wishful thinking.

Nobody said a police officer free of corruption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LasrD6SZkZk

In all seriousness, America does not pull their weapon to prevent bad things from happening (or at least, not primarily).

The US primarily works through Nato and the UN to intervene in their 'world police' role, but they are happy to start other conflicts without the support of Nato and the UN (see Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, ~~Korea~~).

If the US were really the 'world police', then where were they in Rwanda, in Sudan, in North Korea, in Sri Lanka, in Nigeria, in Myanmar, in DRC, in Ethopia, what are they doing for the Uyghurs, the Rohingyas...

EDIT: see correction from OfSanguineFire, I was wrong about Korea, which was indeed a UN-led intervention.

> without the support of the UN... Korea

The US involvement in the Korean War was organized under the nascent UN.[0] "During the course of the war, 22 nations contributed military or medical personnel to UN Command. Although the United States led the UNC and provided the bulk of its troops and funding, all participants formally fought under the auspices of the UN, with the operation classified as a 'UN-led police action'."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command

Thanks for the correction—I was labouring under the impression that the US were in Korea independently.

Yes, there certainly can be justification for doing so.

Hawaii probably?

But is the annexing part the part that really matters or is it the countless dead and wounded civilians?

It is rather hypcritical to pretend the actions of the US are any different.

> Not in some abstract or vague manner, directly annexing them.

Do you mean like not calling it an intervention? It's been sometime, but I don't think the Ukrainians care too much about Russia calling it a “special operation”…

Half of the articles in the category are WWII campaigns.

Which were invasions, your point being?

They are part of a wider context of a war they did not initiate, often in occupied territories, fighting alongside the native People of said territories (eg. Siegfried Line campaign, Invasion of [German occupied] Elba, Allied invasion of [German occupied] Italy, [German occupied] Normandy landings, Operation Overlord, Battle of [German occupied] Marseille.)

This comment could be the Wikipedia example for Poe's Law.

Yeah, right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Quite frankly they're all bastards and we should stop using all of them.

When was the last time US tried a land grab?

What do you think ethnic Russians abroad are? It's displacing locals with poor rural Russians to try a land grab.

Some people literally wake up suddenly within Russia, since Russia is moving borders 100 m. / night.

Motivation plays a role here. I'm not defending in any means what the US, Israel and many other countries have done or are doing to others, but today, as we are writing, Russia is probably more motivated to harm western businesses by hitting common people than the US or Israel or any other country, except maybe China to a much lesser extent.

How are they hurting western businesses by releasing OSS? We already have LibreOffice. What is the point of your comment?

Sure, they are OSS but how do you know what goes into their binaries? Being open source does not imply that the binaries are not backdoored.

Wouldn't it be relatively trivial for someone to compile, compare checksums and call them out?

It's more likely they'd introduce a security flaw that is hard to detect in the OSS code. If someone finds, they'd just claim it was a security incident which is now fixed (and then they'd move to another masked flaw).

> Wouldn't it be relatively trivial for someone to compile, compare checksums and call them out?

Generally not. Most software does not have reproducible builds, so the checksums would be unlikely to match.

> Sure, they are OSS but how do you know what goes into their binaries? Being open source does not imply that the binaries are not backdoored.

Then build your own binaries. I'm sure the Russian government wouldn't struggle to do this.

In terms of motivation - I think it's more likely that Russia is more motivated to be independent of American controlled software.

Open source == a level of independence from sanctions and foreign government spying.

I love it when every discussion about Putin's full-scale war in Ukraine gets derailed by "but the USA is doing the same".

Suppose that the USA works in the same way, bombing and shelling civilians every day, torturing and raping women and children, launching massive attacks on power plants during winter to freeze the population to death, abducting children from their parents etc. Suppose all this was true. Would it give Russia a moral excuse to do what they are doing?

I love when a discussion about a software product derails about the war in Ukraine...

No the discussion was about boycotting or not using software from even citizens of a country. It wasn't a discussion about the war, it was someone asking since when do we actually have that precedent of boycotting citizens and software made by them too. Even if they operate outside russia. It never was the case before, in any war since the internet was created I guess.

It then veered towards people saying that actually, it's different when Americans invade countries.

That post is out of date. As of August, it developed by a Latvian company ultimately owned by a Singaporean holding company (Onlyoffice Capital Group Pte. Ltd). The Russian market is served by a fork called P7-Office.

I cannot say if there are still indirect ties to Russia, but the direct ones appear fully severed?

The information is still correct. Moving your headquarters is a pretty old trick to circumvent state sanctions (while leaving a good chunk of operations in the sanctioned country as an example) and doesn't fly with checking institutions.

The headquarters have always been in Latvia and UK, what has changed is the owner.

Beneficial is citizen of Russia https://company.lursoft.lv/en/ascensio-system/40103265308

Please do your own research and answer two simple questions below.

How much time (money no object) would it take for you personally to get any citizenship other than your current one?

How much time (assuming your current level of income) would it take for you personally to get any citizenship other than your current one?

I have done my research. The answer to the first question is 6 months (if advertisements on the black market are true), and the second one is between 5 and 10 years. So please don't blame people based solely on their citizenship.

Unless the Singaporean entity uses its funds in a pro-russian manner, I'd consider this fairly isolated.

Sanctions against Russia exist to hurt Russian economy and trade to punish and limit their war capacity. If the money stays outside and does not support the war, then I do not see an issue with a Russian citizen living abroad having an indirect controlling stake.

when usa invaded afghanistan to "avenge 9/11" or iraq over false pretenses that became apparent to everyone but no one cares because "muh american exceptionalism", no one went about their way and "avoided american companies".

what has a russian company have to do with the war? tomorrow if usa once again starts a war to decimate another country for petrodolalrs, will you go out of your way and start shunning your own country?

2 major differences:

- the Afghanistan invasion was an actual reaction to a direct attack, not a “you are close to joining an opponent alliance”

- in the west people were free to criticize the invasion, while Russians have much to fear if they are anti-war.

The first point is more moral, while both wars are ridiculous, they are different scale of ridiculous, but not important from business perspective.

This is extremely important from a business perspective, as it shows the state heavy arm on its people and therefore its business. If it controls people’s speech, people’s business are under even more control.

So, as a business, you face a much bigger risk depending on some compony from a “controlling state”, then a more free state.

This doesn’t mean that USA/the west, doesn’t use it’s private companies, it’s just a difference on scale, and how easy/entrenched that control is.

Another example, is that many european PMs lost the next election cycle with major reason being supporting that war effort. Also, people were actually allowed to protest. Checkout how russian protests are handled.

Just like even today in eastern eurocountries there are some sons of ex wealthy soviets nicknamed “homo sovietis”, with their soviet themed bars, which are perfectly allowed today, but i wonder what would happened if during their youth they opened a “capitalist/ocidental” bar.

When did Afghanistan attack the US? You realize that they did offer to extradite bin Ladin, right? Did Iraq attack the US too? Might as well believe made up Russian propaganda about the Donbass.

Also Who cares if the people in the west were free to criticize it? It didn't stop the war, and it has absolutely nothing to do with embargoes and boycotts. Absolutely no one in Iraq cares that Americans still had their free speech when they destroyed their country and set them back 30 years

Russia wouldn't suddenly be a fine member of the international community if their government wasn't censoring criticism of the war while still invading Ukraine.

> Absolutely no one in Iraq cares that Americans still had their free speech when they destroyed their country and set them back 30 years

Case in point is "doing business with American/Russian companies" not the evils of war, which are undisputable.

The "freedom" is a very important point when doing any kind of risk assessment of a vendor deal.

> You realize that they did offer to extradite bin Ladin, right?

I did not, thanks for the info.

Yes to be clear I agree that doing business with Russian citizens in russia itself is not something I would do. I was referring to Russian corporations that basically migrated away from Russia but still have a most Russian (by citizenship) staff.

Also, just to provide a source and details on the extradition offer, they offered to extradite him to a third country for trial which I think is more than reasonable, but the US said that there was no need for proof or process.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1

>The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks.

>"There's no need to discuss it," Bush said. "We know he's guilty. Just turn him over. … There's nothing to negotiate about. They're harboring a terrorist and they need to turn him over."

So essentially the US and the rest of the world razed a country to the ground because they wanted a man so badly that when the country offered to give that man a fair trial before a third neutral country, the US found that offensive and destroyed them? democracy much?

Yes it's honestly troubling. Until recently I completely believed that they didn't want to give up bin laden at all. Even then, it was unjustified imo to invade a country since I'm sure the US also refuses extradition sometimes.

But to hear that the Talibans were the reasonable or at least negotiating party here is insane.

yeah, what difference is that from blood thirsty tyrants who wish to destroy worlds ? genghis khan slaughtered a huge chunk of human population because he was insulted or something stupid silly. isn't this the same thing?

None whatsoever, why should it?

Because security, embargos and fact that your customers probably won't like that at all.

Ah, being fined is a very good reason - "overcompliance" exists for a reason.

Still good software, still using it.

I'm baffled how posts related to Russian software always get politicized... Can't we just celebrate good free and open source software and leave politics out of it? Don't like who's behind it? Just fork it or don't use it at all!

Software is software, people are people and governments are governments. Stop mixing it all together, it's a hypocrites minefield. If you're feeling so righteous about the countries of who writes your software, just throw your computer out of the window.

> Software is software, people are people and governments are governments.

While that is true, it is also true, that people can easily be forced by bad acting governments to do things to the software they write.

We don't need to condemn the people in general, but we can still be wary of the product they make, while being in the influence zone of certain governments.

On the whole, the answer here is "not at all," or if anything, slightly increases the likelihood that I'll use it.

1) There's a difference between a government and people living in that country. If my country does something evil, that doesn't mean you should attack me (personally). The firebombing of Dresden by the allies in WWII is widely considered a war crime since it targeted civilians and killed many little children.

2) With sanctions on this war, I see two valid goals: (1) Regime change (2) Not funding / supporting the war. To be clear: Punishment of people in Russia is not a valid goal for sanctions.

3) With a country doing something evil, simply cutting off ties doesn't have much positive effect (see North Korea).

4) Attacking people simply polarizes them to hate you and supports Putin's message.

5) Even under sanctions, there are constructive ways of engagement. These generally center on communications and cultural engagement. Things like rock-and-roll, Disney, Coca Cola, McDonald's and blue jeans played a pretty significant role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. Trade helped open up China (it's not open, but it's a much freer, nicer place to live than 50 years ago, largely due to people doing business across borders).

My general conclusion here:

1) I don't think we should be buying anything from Russia. That provides money to support the war effort.

2) I don't think we should be exporting anything which can in any way be used to help build weapons (e.g. technology, raw materials, etc.).

3) I'm also on the more extreme end of sending more weapons to Ukraine (much more than we have been).

On the other hand, with Russia, I am fully in favor of scientific engagement (think blue whales and not radar research), educational engagement, cultural engagement, as well as things like open source.

Controversially, I'm also supportive of /selling/ luxury goods to Russia. I don't think it supports the regime in any appreciable way, and a Gucci handbag won't help the war effort. It does bring in Western culture and leads to capital outflow.

> 1) There's a difference between a government and people living in that country. If my country does something evil, that doesn't mean you should attack me (personally). The firebombing of Dresden by the allies in WWII is widely considered a war crime since it targeted civilians and killed many little children.

This. 20 years ago I read an article that spoke of the Iranian peoples' admiration for American people, while the two governments were actively hating each other. It changed everything about how I perceived other countries. We don't have to be our governments.

They could use a little money with how things seem to be going

To be fair, I would be more comfortable with Russian open source software that I can run locally over proprietary software from the US or Europe that run on someone else's servers.

> We would like to host ONLYOFFICE ourselves. Is that possible?

> Yes. It is possible to download and compile the source code. Thereafter you can deploy it on your own server. The source code is listed on GitHub and distributed under GNU Affero General Public License terms. For more details see the Server Version Frequently Asked Questions section.

You don't have that with Google Docs or Office 365.

True, but you have a bigger user base and if there's any document exfiltration or compromise, it's more likely other people will notice too.

Yes, with open source you can look at the source, but who analyses the whole codebase before compiling anything?

Why would I care?

Zero chance. And I'm glad that I saw this comment before following link and wasting time researching this product.

To those who comment on the OSS nature of the product, I would suggest that you ask yourself if you are actually willing to perform security audits of the suite and its updates, or roll the dice and hope that your data doesn't get exfiltrated or corrupted one day. Unlike with software developed in other countries, you can't count on the developers to care about their reputation more than some quick gains. As long as the core of the devteam is in Russia - this is out of their control.

I'm assuming you're using Microsoft Office though -- if such is the case, what then is your take on Microsoft's recent Azure security lapses? Does that, to your mind, tarnish the reputation of American big-tech?

I'm more concerned that it's written in C#.

I've been using it for 3 years comrade and I still prefer Russian snooping to Alphabet snooping or Microsoft security lapses. I'd rather get Collabra going via Nextcloud but my laziness stops me.

Somehow it is not the Word/Excel file readability why I must buy Office license. But the Teams.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19 I'm still waiting for this 7 year issue. I have doubts about how open source this is. Based on the comments, someone created a PR to support RTL, but the maintainers refused to review it.

The responsiveness of maintainers to PRs has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's actually open source.

True: the license is the only thing that matters for whether it is open-source or not.

it could be too much effort to implement RTL

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19#issue...

> @ONLYOFFICE, FYI to add bidi-directional support (LTR, RTL and mixed) in Web interface is as simple to add to element dir=auto.

> If I remember correctly, they are using canvas with custom rendering logic. Hence many native browser capabilities might not be available.

Oh, jeez, why? I want to install this just to point a screen reader at it and watch the havoc. Maybe they got that figured out but good lord...

Because that is basically what you have to do if you want a truly rich editor that works and looks consistently across browsers and operating systems.

Maybe today you could get something to work using a combination of contenteditable and canvas, with code to handle the inconsistencies between browsers. But I know that at least a few years ago, rendering to a canvas was a necessity for rich web apps like this. Google docs at least used to be canvas based as well. I'm not sure if that is still the case.

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