Euro-Office launches its stable 1.0 release on June 9, billed as a ‘truly open’ sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office – a claim riling The Document Foundation, makers of LibreOffice.
In an open letter published today, TDF’s Italo Vignoli takes issue with the upstart productivity suite’s pitch.
He disputes Euro-Office’s marketing, which he says positions it as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. It’s historically inaccurate as OpenOffice.org got there in 2001, followed by LibreOffice from 2010.
But he calls out another issue.
The European Union is making a big push for digital sovereignty, cutting down on how much it uses and relies on US big tech like Google and Microsoft and proprietary formats that prevent easy switching.
Euro-Office, a fork of ONLYOFFICE – and it’s makers are not thrilled by it – backed by tech companies like NextCloud, Proton and IONOS, aims to capitalise on those concerns, offering a freely accessible, web-based collaborative office suite.
Vignoli points out a contradiction: Euro-Office defaults to the proprietary OOXML document format, which is developed by Microsoft. That makes the suite, in TDF’s eyes, a “de facto ally” of Microsoft.
In a further jab at what he sees as opportunism, he quips that LibreOffice isn’t a “freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself […] to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty”.
“Many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile.”
Sharp words.
Euro-Office is web-based rather than a standalone desktop app, designed to be integrated into or access from other products, much like the ONLYOFFICE codebase it’s built on.