The most popular point of view has become that AlterOffice is absolutely rightly excluded from the Unified Register of Russian Computer Programs and, in general, “This craft does not have any legal basis to be considered a Russian development. If suddenly this creation again appears in the Register, then before the entire Ministry of Digital and the members of the expert council it will be necessary to raise the question of the conformity of their positions. " Alternative opinions , which boil down to the fact that not everything is so simple and it is necessary to understand, did not receive wide public support.
In the summer, the disputes subsided, after all, even during the time of the coronavirus, no one canceled holidays and summer vacations, but then autumn came and the Moscow Arbitration Court expressed its opinion on this issue. It is unlikely that arbitration court judges read Habr, so the position of the court diverged somewhat from the position that prevailed here. For details please see cat.
Before moving on to the news itself, let me remind you what happened in the previous series.
For those who are not very aware of the Unified Register
To begin with, office applications that want to get into the Registry must meet additional criteria . The verification of compliance with these and other criteria is now carried out by experts on their own. In order to make it easier to apply and verify the ICT Import Substitution Competence Center has issued guidelines . And in October 2020, a new procedure for inclusion in the Register should work , which of course will solve all problems . The preliminary assessment, by the way, will be made by the ICT Import Substitution Competence Center.
AlterOffice was included in the Unified Register in May 2019, and already excluded in November 2019from the Registry. It is noteworthy that in February 2020 the Ministry of Finance returned to this issue and clarified the basis for excluding AlterOffice from the Register. At the same time, there is an opinion that the exclusion from the Register could be associated with a tender for the purchase of office software for the Ministry of Digital Science .
If we move away from the bureaucratic and legal history of the issue and look at it from a technical point of view, it becomes clear that a significant part of the office software included in the Registry is to one degree or another based on Libre Office or Open Office. A good analysis of some of the packages is given here... Proceeding from this, all those claims that are made to programs like AlterOffice become obvious. At first glance, it looks very strange when someone takes open source software, makes some modifications and includes it in the Registry, one of the requirements of which is the applicant's exclusive rights. Logic suggests that it is much easier to use, for example, Libre Office, and not its conditional clones or less mature products. However, in reality, this is not at all so ...
Fast forward to the beginning of September. CNews and D-Russia publish the news that the Moscow Arbitration Court ordered the Ministry of Taxes to return Alter Office to the Register. That's how it is! Having learned about such an interesting turn, we go to the website of the Arbitration Court, find there a case40-114871 / 2020 , we read the operative part of the decision , stock up on popcorn and wait for the decision to be made in full.
Finally, on September 10, the full decision is published . In the motivation part of the decision, in my opinion, there are no sensational conclusions, everyone who was interested in the issue knows that the Russian Civil Code is not particularly friendly with free licenses, preferring to almost ignore them. However, in Russia the exclusive right is confirmed by filing an application for inclusion in the Register of computer programs, and Article 1262The Civil Code of the Russian Federation says that “the information entered in the Register of computer programs or in the Register of databases is considered reliable, since otherwise has not been proven. The applicant is responsible for the accuracy of the information provided for state registration. " In this case, as part of the application for inclusion in the Register of computer programs, "deposited materials identifying the computer program" are submitted . Let's look into the Registry of computer programs and find there AlterOffice under the number 2019611306.
Why was this deviation, but to the fact that the court in justification of its decision leads the following.
№ 2019611306
24.01.2019 «AlterOffice»
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The court also takes into account that the applicant's exclusive rights to the AlterOffice software are not disputed or limited. There are no disputes related to the protection of infringed intellectual property rights in relation to the Program.
Evidence to the contrary was not presented to the court.
As you can see, Judge Alsup's approach does not apply here. In fact, do not clone the same court from GitHub repositories AlterOffice and Libre Office and do not diff them. The experience would be amusing though.
And then the most interesting thing:
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16.09.2019 № 5-05/2435 «»,
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.. 29.08.2019 № 11-1-06-062-20043»,
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So the reader of this article can safely go to his personal account on GitHub and get the source code there, as required by MPL .
So it goes.
I believe that there is a high probability of an appeal against this decision and we will see the continuation of this story. Perhaps the parties to the dispute will even have to write to Sportloto.
I would like to note that for all the ambiguity of the story with AlterOffice, the formation of judicial practice in cases of this kind, in my opinion, indicates a positive trend. The rules of the game may not suit someone, but let them be clear and unambiguous.