I’m amused, legally amused

You may have followed the ONLYOFFICE vs. Euro-Office kerfuffle about commercial open source licensing. Ascensio Systems SIA, the company behind ONLYOFFICE, a Microsoft Office like office suite, makes its money by selling commercial licenses to OPENOFFICE. Like many so-called commercial open source vendors, it provides its software under an open source license but also tries to keep others from distributing their programs so that customers can only buy from them.

Euro-Office is a new office suite distribution. The vendors behind Euro-Office repackage ONLYOFFICE and distribute it as part of Euro-Office, cutting out the vendor behind ONLYOFFICE, Ascensio Systems.

Euro-Office claims it is allowed to repackage and redistribute OPENOFFICE courtesy of its open source license, the AGPL-3.0. However, Ascensio Systems added restrictions to the license that prevent such a redistribution without purchasing from Ascensio Systems first. Euro-Office argues that another clause in the AGPL license, which requires that any undue restriction can be removed from the license, applies, and then proceeds to remove these restrictions. With the restrictions removed, Euro-Office can now distribute freely.

The AGPL clause of not unduly restricting user freedoms works well in the primary intended case: That of three parties. If the first party, an open source programmer, licenses out their work under the AGPL, and a second party distributes the first party’s work, but with undue restrictions in a changed license, then the third party can simply remove these restrictions per the intentions of the first and original party.

However, this is not the case here. In the OPENOFFICE vs. Euro-Office case, the vendor behind OPENOFFICE is both the first and second party. They licensed out their work with a license that contains a contradiction: A restriction they want to enforce, and an option to remove that restriction. Ascensio System’s assertion that the restrictions do not subvert the AGPL license does not ring true. So the question becomes: Which part of the license holds more power? The option to remove an undue AGPL restriction or the restriction itself?

NextCloud, a vendor behind Euro-Office, not surprisingly argues that they are allowed to remove the restrictions, because the AGPL says so and various luminaries of the Free Software Foundation, the creator of the AGPL license, said so as well. Ascensio Systems obviously disagrees.

I think this can be resolved, and it can go either way.

1. If Ascensio Systems keeps insisting that OPENOFFICE is open-source software, because it uses the AGPL license, well then the AGPL license prevails and Euro-Office can remove the undue restrictions and distribute freely.
2. If Ascensio Systems stops calling their work open source and admits they use their own license, a concoction of AGPL and the restrictions they came up with, then their intention of restriction prevails and Euro-Office can’t redistribute.

Ascensio System’s intentions are clear (to prevent redistribution) and in my experience, courts go with intentions rather than mistakes. Euro-Office’s removal of the restriction would then be seen as a circumvention attempt.

I’m legally amused, because the only way out I see for Ascensio Systems is to argue their license is not an open source license so that their non-open-source restrictions can prevail. This would be quite the departure from their strong language about the use of the AGPL and that OPENOFFICE is open-source software.

Of course, IANAL, so buyer beware.