onlyoffice tried to add stuff in the fine print, and failed
izumi_hsieh
·
2026-04-20
·
via LWN.net comments
About this situation, siding completely with the FSF. The entire drama is about section 7(b) and 7(e). Essentially, OnlyOffice added a modification to section 7(b), requiring that redistribution of the software retain the product logo, while the modification allowed in section 7(e) declines giving trademark rights to the product logo. If we take this, it means OnlyOffice is not open source at all, it would be what people are calling nowadays "source-available", you cannot distribute it at all, since you need to include a logo you don't have the rights to. So, either this restriction is not valid, or we have an amazing blunder by the FSF, which wrote a license which could be manipulated to provide non-FOSS software. To see what happens, we need to read the license. Section 7(b) states "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms: b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it;" It's about legal notices and author attributions, it doesn't cover trademarkable assets like product logos. Furthermore: 'All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.' So, the FSF has done its job well, the original license text already predicted this tricky maneuver. It's a good thing that this happened because it will discourage other companies from pretending they're open source when they are not.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理,仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。