Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7zlf2/onlyoffice_is_obfuscating_its_russian_ownership/
Recently there have been multiple threads here discussing OnlyOffice and the confusion surrounding its ownership. OnlyOffice was fairly popular in Ukraine. When the Russian full-scale invasion started in 2022, Ukrainian companies started evaluating all of the products and services they used. The Ukrainian company DMS Solutions wrote a blog post in March 2022 about how they decided to drop OnlyOffice:
During the last two weeks DMS Solutions has been officially approaching OnlyOffice with requests for clarification on whether OnlyOffice condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Upon our numerous requests and reminders - DMS Solutions received a short response from OnlyOffice team (Galina Goduhina, Sales Director) that OnlyOffice stays away from “politics”. Not giving war its real name and hiding behind the word “politics” when the whole world is united saying this is brutal war and russian invasation of Ukraine violates all the principles of international law - is a worrying message, especially considering that all global business communities and world leaders are calling for actions and official statements on the unprecedented Russian invasion of Ukraine. No further response from OnlyOffice has been received.
In July 2022, DMS Solutions representatives wrote a longer exposé on the topic, published on Ukrainska Pravda’s economy portal. The article is in Ukrainian and includes relevant pictures, so do check it out in full, using machine translation if needed. I will quote some key parts. I omit the links as posting Russian sites to Reddit results in automatic removal of the post.
For a full picture, I think we would need a data leak in the style of Panama Papers. In 2023 OnlyOffice announced it opened a holding company in Singapore, which is now the ultimate beneficiary of the Latvian company. Singapore is a major tax haven with strong banking secrecy.
One of the OnlyOffice partners’ blogs has this comment from the developers: [Note: the infobox site link (linked from “коментар”) doesn’t work, but can be accessed via Internet Archive]
"OnlyOffice is developed in Russia by the Closed Joint Stock Company “New Communication Technologies” (a 100% Russian company), all development and management are located in Russia, in the city of Nizhny Novgorod.
The company has a Latvian subsidiary Ascensio System SIA for sales in the EU and the USA. As part of the import substitution program, the product took 1st place in the category of “Custom Office Software”.
The Russian portal for choosing technologies and suppliers TAdviser indicates that OnlyOffice products were used by government agencies of the Russian Federation, in particular, the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Nizhny Novgorod Region.
This agency wrote that OnlyOffice is a development of Nizhny Novgorod programmers. Since 2015, the company’s software has also helped to “optimize the work” of the St. Petersburg Cadet Military Corps, which is subordinate to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
…
The developer of OnlyOffice, the company “New Communication Technologies” (NKT), was founded in 1998 in Nizhny Novgorod. During the rebranding in 2021, its name was changed to “R7-Office” (R7 JSC).
“R7-Office” released an office suite of the same name for the Russian market in 2018. The developer calls “R7-Office” a fork of the OnlyOffice office suite. In addition, the office of the Russian representative office of Ascensio System SIA is located at the same address as the NKT office: Nizhny Novgorod, Larina St., 22D.
DMS Solution says that “R7-Office” is a product with the same characteristics as OnlyOffice. Only for the Russian user since 2018 it is sold under the name “R7-Office”, where “R” refers to the Russian family of launch vehicles.
As is known, the R-7 is the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile and the world’s first launch vehicle with a nuclear warhead. It was in service from 1960 to 1968. This version is substantiated by illustrations of new releases of “R7-Office”. They depict the launch of a rocket similar to the R-7.
The “R7-Office” branch from OnlyOffice seems to have been made with one goal in mind: to increase sales in Russia in the wake of the intensification of import substitution, which became relevant due to the sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation after 2014.
…
OnlyOffice developers in the Russian information space emphasize that the Latvian Ascensio System SIA is a 100% subsidiary and 100% property of the Russian company NKT. The open database of companies registered in Latvia, Lursoft, also indicates a Russian beneficiary. [Note: citizenship seems to have changed from Russia to Turkey in 2023]
DMS Solutions has asked the Latvian registration authorities to investigate OnlyOffice. The Ukrainian company suggested that OnlyOffice used its Latvian registration to enter international markets.
The Latvian government has confirmed that the ultimate beneficial owner of Ascensio System SIA is Russian citizen Lev Bannov, who is listed in the Latvian register. He is the founder of the Nizhny Novgorod company “New Communication Technologies” since 1998 and was its CEO until 2020.
His Facebook location is listed as Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Do I like that it’s Russian. No. Of course not. But through work I have a few fairly complex spreadsheets that if I have any hope of working on them from home (where I run Linux entirely) while being able to then open them back up properly in Excel at work. LibreOffice Calc just falls apart.
Don’t get me wrong. I love LibreOffice. Heck, I even helped out a bit a long time ago writing the documentation for some long ago version I don’t even remember anymore. But it’s just not good enough to risk corrupting my spreadsheets and losing my ability to work on them on both work and home computers. OnlyOffice is the only one that has been flawless in that regard.
Do I want to ditch OnlyOffice because of the Russia connection? Yes. Can I? No. That being said, I’m not paying for any services like cloud sync or web editing. I just have their “community edition” desktop editor.
Thats interesting, I’m the opposite in that I use libreoffice because onlyoffice couldn’t handle a spreadsheet with a couple thousand rows and like 50 columns without running like molasses or crashing.
Mine aren’t quite that large. I think my biggest one taps in at about 640 rows or so. Where I run into trouble with LO is more in the way of table formatting, certain calculations that and a few other fixable things. But the two biggest ones are simply that my work spreadsheets use macros, which IIRC, LO handles in a completely different way. And also for some reason the copy and paste function works differently and screws up all my V and H LOOKUPS.
It’s a real shame. I’ve looked into ONLYOFFICE before, and they did all kinds of corporate restructuring tactics to try to hide that they’re Russian. I’m guessing it’s done to keep their contracts with European customers, but software made by a group that acts suspiciously is quite suspicious to me.
It looks like they’re now trying to cater to both the Russian and the European market. You can’t do both at this moment, not if you’re based in a warring totalitarian state like Russia; the risks are too high. Another probably-well-meaning company fucked over by Putin’s evil plans.
I just recently set up a private NextCloud instance and had OnlyOffice integrated for document editing, until I tested it on my phone and saw you needed to pay for a license to edit documents on mobile. Went with Collabora instead, which is working nicely. Dodged a bullet there.
I have collabora too! It’s a bit slow, but it’s the only service that works decent for editing a spreadsheet for me. Besides google spreadsheet DID of course.
Hmm, that is potentially concerning. I liked OnlyOffice slightly more than LibreOffice, and the ease in which it does online collaboration was nice, but going back to LibreOffice is no real suffrage.
One alternative I haven’t seen mentioned is MobiOffice. It’s developed by Mobi Systems, a Bulgarian company. I’ve been using it for years and I’d say it’s the closest thing to Microsoft Office out there.
I didn’t know OnlyOffice had Russian ties until now so if anyone has more info that point in the same direction for MobiOffice, please share.
So… is it or isnt it russian
I would say it is
It’s open source, so how much does it matter?
It seems equivalent to not wanting to use GNU/Linux since it’s American.
Complicated…
ONLYOFFICE offers a paid service for syncing, and there’s other stuff too I think… If they’re Russian and you pay for their services, well.
Even if you’re just using it, I mean, are you checking the code? Because I’m not. You could check the code and build it from source, but are you? Yeah, probably not.
Linux is truly international, even if the Linux Foundation is American. ONLYOFFICE is Latvian with seemingly strong Russian ties, if not being straight-up Russian owned. Not quite the same, I’d say.
