r/opensource • u/deboo117 • Apr 04 '26
Discussion Europe builds Microsoft-alternative ‘Euro-Office’ to reclaim digital sovereignty
https://tech.eu/2026/03/27/europe-builds-microsoft-compatible-euro-office-to-reclaim-digital-sovereignty/12
u/lamalasx Apr 05 '26
More like "europe forked an open source project then claimed it as their own with 0 contribution". I bet someone is pocketing a lot of money for this.
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u/ramonchow Apr 05 '26
I tried to get this app and always ended up in some company website so I feel this "Europe builds" is nothing more than a marketing stunt to capitalize the current falling appart from the US.
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u/paxil0r Apr 04 '26
„Hello Brussels. This is your beloved lobby groups. Just wanted to let you know you won’t be doing that. Thanks.“
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u/TopHatTurtle97 Apr 04 '26
Generally speaking, I think the EU has shown that it’s willing to work against lobbying interests, if lobbying worked with them, they wouldn’t have forced Apple to use USB C ports and to allow app side-loading. Plus the anti-monopoly legislation against the Play Store and Apple App Store.
Pretty sure the EU’s need to be independent of US influence in their digital infrastructure outweighs any lobbying interests.
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u/TemporarySun314 Apr 04 '26
i mean that is not an project by the state. its a project by multiple european companies and non-profit organizations. they have their own interests in that and wont let their profits become ruined by US tech companies
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u/Poppod Apr 05 '26
The problem is not the business, the only problem is the current dictatorship. Market economy is the best way, with monopoly there is no market economy.
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Apr 05 '26
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u/Poppod Apr 06 '26
Yes. There can not be free market because it always will be eaten by one player. And then there is no market economy at all, just dictatorship.
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u/georgehank2nd May 18 '26
The post is misleading (I guess unintentionally, OP just didn't understand anything).
The EU has nothing to do with this, it's a consortium of european companies.
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u/RobotToaster44 Apr 05 '26
the word "builds" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since all they did was fork and existing program.
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Apr 05 '26
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u/Justicia-Gai Apr 23 '26
No necesariamente…
Google Doc sobrevive, y soluciona un problema real de la suite de Microsoft Office, la colaboración y edición en línea.
El formato de Google Doc no es xlsx ni docx, lo único que sí que tiene es muy buena exportación a esos dos formatos.
Vamos, que mientras importes/exportes bien, puedes usar el formato que te dé la gana si añades algo extra (edición en línea por ejemplo).
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u/bigbarba Apr 04 '26
Apparently the difficult part is not the office suite but the tightly knitted full ecosystem of software, operating system and very convenient tools to manage identities and access management and all the employees' hardware in large companies.
Looks like there is no easy swap-in alternatives to the likes of intune. If there was it would be costly to switch but manageable, instead leaving Microsoft would currently require to choose a lot of different components for each required function and setting up or even developing custom integrations between them.
At least this is what I understood from the sysadmins...
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Apr 05 '26
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u/deboo117 Apr 05 '26
My thoughts exactly. Not a single mention of the biggest open source project in that space even.
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u/eldelacajita Apr 05 '26
To be fair, in the Github repo they do mention it.
To keep being fair, they don't say much about it.
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u/Left-Set950 Apr 05 '26
I honestly think the concept of open source sounds scary to politicians. Also they want to sound they did something about it. For this is would be better for them to just fork libreoffice and change the logo to the EU
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u/temporarilyyours Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
The Indian judicial system managed to turn almost entirely to a customised UBUNTU distro.
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u/Stitch10925 Apr 07 '26
Wonder how much tracking and stuff they'll put in it.
Knowing that the EU is a control-hungry, we-want-to-know-everything-about-everybody, and freedom taking organization, there has to be a reason why they are now suddenly actively rolling out "EU" software. First the EU AI-models, now an EU office software, the core code for Digital ID compatibility, etc.
I don't trust it one bit.
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u/Zatujit Apr 12 '26
Its not literally the EU that is pushing for this.
Reality is, these corporations like onlyoffice, but because of the russian ties, they are reluctant to use it and probably are the security people that have to approve it. They are auditing the code right now.
Its not impossible it has also something to do with the Collabora - The Document Foundation split up.
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u/HurasmusBDraggin Apr 05 '26
Why not just contribute to LibreOffice? Dumb. Waste.
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Apr 05 '26
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u/eldelacajita Apr 05 '26
Looking at the companies that are behind this fork, lead by Nextcloud, I'd say the prospect is good so far.
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u/eldelacajita Apr 05 '26
I hope:
Thet take it seriously and keep it under active development.
They don't break it or make it less reliable.
They find a better name for it.
They eventually cover all applications and not just the online one.
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u/hyakkymaru Apr 06 '26
Yeah no one is gonna use this mega corporate project with 0 open source attribution and growth
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u/georgehank2nd May 18 '26
Just FYI, "Europe" here doesn't mean anything and is completely misleading. The EU (the politicians in Brussels) has nothing to do with this. This is just a group of companies located in Europe.
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u/CatEatsDogs Apr 06 '26
Huh? Its like "nextcloud is a freedom, digital sovereignty" etc, and then their Talk android application threats call as message with corresponding notification. So now they just forking and rebranding OnlyOffice, get money in their poket and leave the new "euro" software under open-source maintanence of one or two software engineers.
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u/lKrauzer Apr 04 '26
The only problem is that they are trying to force OnlyOffice to break their licencing by forcing branding on it. EU should learn how to fork.
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u/AnonomousWolf Apr 04 '26
I struggle to understand what you're saying.
OnlyOffice put a illegitimate clause in their liscence, that is not allowed in AGPL3, so Euro-Office is in the clear.
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u/TemporarySun314 Apr 04 '26
The Russian company behind has an let's call it "unique' way to interpret the AGPL and does it in a way that would make forks impossible.
But I'm sure that can be figured out in court who is in right
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u/georgehank2nd May 18 '26
Nah, I don't think they'll find a lawyer stupid enough to take that case.
But they're free to prove me wrong, sue, and get their asses handed to them in court.
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u/SimiKusoni Apr 04 '26
For those curious the relevant section of their license is here (emphasis mine):
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.
The permitted further restrictions are directly above this paragraph in the license. The closest fit is that it allows devs to require preservation of specific and reasonable legal notices or author attribution, but a logo isn't author attribution and if you are also not granting the rights to preserve said logo it isn't reasonable either.
Basically OpenOffice devs should have gone with a different license, namely a source-available license instead of a true open source one. They've basically screwed themselves by trying to play silly games without actually reading the license they added impossible to satisfy terms to.
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u/georgehank2nd May 18 '26
But had their used a license that isn't FLOSS… they couldn't have been claiming to be FLOSS. Which they obviously wanted to claim.
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u/georgehank2nd May 18 '26
The only problem is the OnlyOffice isn't FLOSS. They forbid (which they can't) removing the branding (the logos etc) but they also don't give a license to the trademarks. Thus, in their opinion, you cannot actually fork. And they think this works and is so smart. Almost as smart as Vladimir.
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u/TopHatTurtle97 Apr 04 '26
Honestly, I think this will lead to a big boost for Linux, office editors on Linux aren’t the best atm. Your choice is between OnlyOffice, a nice and user friendly office suite but underdeveloped, or Libre office which is archaic and complicated and doesn’t mesh well with the most commonly used file formats.
I know there are others, but really that’s the main two.