Moscow Court Rejects Basealt SPO Suite Over Bare LibreOffice Core
Russia's digital ministry blocked Basealt SPO from adding its office suite to the domestic software register, and an arbitration court agreed: bundling open-source code is not domestic development.
A Moscow Arbitration Court has upheld the Russian Ministry of Digital Development's refusal to admit Free Office (Свободный офис), a software package by Basealt SPO, into the official register of domestic software, Russian media reported via Kommersant.
The suite combines a document editor, web browser, email client, and a proprietary digital signature utility dubbed Surguch. Basealt SPO applied for registration in April 2026, pitching the package as adapted for domestic chips like Elbrus, localized into Russian, and prepped with GOST cryptography and local root certificates. But state evaluators balked: out of seven programs in the bundle, five were third-party open-source projects, and the core office application was essentially LibreOffice.
According to the ministry's expert council, Free Office was merely a compilation where open-source components were presented without substantial modifications. The court ruled that adding Russian spellcheckers, dictionaries, translation, and a signature plugin did not make Basealt SPO the rights holder of the underlying product. Under formal standards, the court classified the bundle as an aggregate "complex of programs" rather than a single unified piece of software, meaning every constituent application had to independently clear the registry's requirements.
The court also cited practical disqualifiers: components pinged foreign servers for updates, and open-source "copyleft" licenses theoretically limited commercialization under register rules. Basealt SPO co-founder Alexey Smirnov pushed back, arguing update pings to foreign servers only occur if a user clicks an "About" button, open-source licenses do allow commercial distribution, and Russian law contains no strict threshold for how much code an author must rewrite to claim a derivative work.
The ruling leaves domestic developers facing an unresolved legal boundary: Russian copyright law treats any modification as a derivative creation, but the state's procurement gatekeepers demand far deeper rewrites before open source qualifies for domestic subsidies and public tenders.
Source: habr
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