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Comment by arcadialeak | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but notice that this, in effect, establishes collaboration between EU and Russian devs over a common open-source office suite, because both projects can easily copy future changes from each other. The irony is staggering, given the war and the public rhetoric.

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It doesn't seem like a pleasant, bilateral collaboration since Russian developers do not seem pleased about the Euro-Office initiative.[0]

[0]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE#%EF%B8%8F-legal-note

Yes, but they can't do anything about it anyway. The FSF resolution on this matter, though, essentially means that they might just as well pull Euro-Office patches into OnlyOffice. So in the end, the product will be formed by combined effort.

The codebase will diverge quickly; the Russian one is heavily obfuscated with s ton of Russian in it and obscure commit messages. A large portion of prep work by Nextcloud was cleaning and translating. OnlyOffice was also known for refusing PRs, too.

> Pursuant to Section 7 of AGPLv3, the copyright holder is expressly entitled to impose additional conditions. In the case of ONLYOFFICE, such conditions include, in particular:

>the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));

>the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).

In other words you must use our logo and you must not use our logo. Good luck enforcing that.

War is between governments. A bad actor might as well lie that they're not Russian. If anything this is a good thing. Lets not make war define who we work with

Hard disagree. The war has been at least tacitly supported by the majority of the Russian public (via enlistment, taxation or just acquiescence) and it's very explicitly being waged against the Ukrainian public (via killing, occupation, expropriation etc).

"Define who we work with" is basically the point of sanctions. Unless you think they're too robust too, and we should limit ourselves to strongly worded postcards?

Wait how does it establish collaboration? Because its opensource so anyone can copy the source code? If so, thats a pretty weak, and disengenuous argument. Is the US collaborating with russia because russians can use the internet and darpa funded its initial RnD?

Euro-Office codebase will, obviously, not diverge significantly from the original product. If they planned fundamental changes, they would have started from scratch because taking over a huge project and rewriting its basis is an ever more daunting undertaking.

As such, any future patches to both codebases should be trivial to copy from one another, which essentially makes it collaboration.

The developer is "Ascensio System SIA", and they are located in Riga, Latvia.

Why the mention of Russian developers?

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Oh, god

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