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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Euro-Office, an open-source alternative to mainstream office suites, has officially launched its first stable version.
- It’s being promoted as a key piece of the EU’s digital independence strategy, but it’s not yet ready for widespread use.
- Disagreements with other open-source groups are creating additional challenges.
If digital independence matters to you — and it’s a major priority for the European Union (EU) — you’ll be glad to learn that Euro‑Office, a new open-source, browser-based office suite designed to compete with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, has officially shipped its first stable release.
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A group of EU-based companies, including Nextcloud, Ionos, and other Euro-Stack participants, is positioning Euro-Office as a foundational element of European digital independence. However, The Document Foundation (TDF), the organization behind LibreOffice, claims the project actually strengthens Microsoft’s grip on document formats, which TDF says goes against the spirit of open standards.
Putting the open-source debates aside for now, here’s what Euro-Office actually offers.
Euro‑Office reaches version 1.0
The release went live on June 9. It’s important to understand, though, that this isn’t a standalone office suite you install like traditional software. As the project’s backers clarify in their FAQ, “Euro-Office is primarily an integration component. It handles document editing, but storage, navigation, permissions, and sharing must be provided by whatever platform it’s integrated into, such as Proton Docs, Nextcloud Hub, or OpenProject.”
That means if you want to run Euro-Office on your own Linux server, you’ll need to handle the integration yourself. If you’re not a Linux expert, though, there are already companies offering pre-packaged, ready-to-deploy Euro-Office solutions, including Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, Ionos’ Nextcloud Workspace, and Office.eu. All of these early offerings are web-based rather than traditional desktop applications.
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According to the organizers, the goal is to give European organizations a way to run their office suite on EU-based infrastructure governed by EU regulations, while keeping an interface that Microsoft Office users will find familiar. Specifically, Euro-Office is designed to be “a tool for editing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, built as a genuine sovereign community collaboration involving more than a dozen organizations.”
To be honest, the product still feels a bit unpolished. The ribbon-style interface will be immediately recognizable to anyone who’s used Microsoft Office. At the same time, the interface still shows OnlyOffice branding in certain spots, and the menus and dialog boxes feel somewhat outdated. Despite these rough edges, the software is functional.
While I can’t provide a full review just yet, I can confirm that it runs smoothly on my NextCloud instance hosted on a Rocky Linux server. Rocky is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
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I’ve found that the core editor works well and real-time collaboration functions properly, but the setup process is, to put it mildly, finicky. I can handle that — I’ve been working with Linux server applications for a very long time — but I’d strongly recommend most people go with NextCloud Hub 26 Spring or another pre-configured package instead of attempting a manual setup.
I should also be clear that, at this stage, the release feels more like a technology preview than a polished product. I’d advise against using it in a production environment unless you’re comfortable troubleshooting integration problems. In a few months, I expect the situation will look quite different.
The push for digital independence
Euro‑Office is built as a fork of OnlyOffice’s open-source core. OnlyOffice’s developer, Ascensio System SIA, initially claimed the fork violated the terms of its GNU AGPLv3 license, accusing the Euro-Office team of not meeting attribution and branding requirements. However, AGPL co-author Bradley Kuhn sided with the Euro-Office developers on the licensing question. Further discussions reportedly resolved the dispute before the June launch.
An important related point is that Euro‑Office supporters see the fork as a necessary step to ensure that key features and project governance meet European public-sector needs. They point to concerns about OnlyOffice’s strategic direction, lack of transparency, and connections to Russia.
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The supporters argue that placing control over development, hosting, and legal jurisdiction in European hands is critical for governments and public institutions to trust an office suite as part of a broader sovereign cloud ecosystem.
TDF pushes back
TDF, which manages LibreOffice and advocates for the Open Document Format (ODF), has become Euro‑Office’s most outspoken critic. In its June 7 open letter, TDF challenged Euro-Office’s marketing claim of being “the first European open-source office suite,” pointing instead to a lineage that includes StarOffice-derived OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice itself, both of which have deep European roots.
TDF’s leadership argues that Euro-Office’s messaging risks erasing history and downplaying the contributions that existing European office suites have made in turning digital sovereignty into a mainstream policy objective. The letter describes Euro-Office as “the latest of the office suites developed in Europe, and not the first,” suggesting that claims to the contrary mislead policymakers and users about the landscape of European productivity software.
The core of the disagreement
Beyond branding, TDF’s main objection is Euro-Office’s choice to use Microsoft’s OOXML formats as the default for saving documents instead of ODF. TDF notes that OOXML is a complex ISO standard built around Microsoft Office’s behavior and, in practice, controlled by Microsoft, arguing that making it the default undermines any claim of true independence from Microsoft.
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TDF draws a clear distinction between supporting Microsoft formats for compatibility — which it acknowledges as a practical necessity — and adopting those formats as the native default in public-sector deployments. “Compatibility is not sovereignty,” TDF cautioned, asserting that a European-branded suite that saves every file in OOXML “is effectively an ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy,” regardless of where the servers are located or which organizations manage the code.
I covered the ODF versus OOXML debates extensively back in the mid-to-late 2000s. While I still personally prefer ODF, the reality is that Microsoft Office formats are what the vast majority of people use daily, like it or not.
Euro‑Office supporters are correct that European public-sector transitions can’t succeed without strong support for the Office documents organizations already depend on, and promising “full compatibility with Microsoft formats” is a practical requirement, not a surrender.
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The supporters note that ODF support is planned for the future and emphasize that the project’s governance, licensing, and hosting are all based in Europe. They argue that this approach meaningfully shifts control away from US tech giants and proprietary SaaS platforms.
Fighting among ourselves helps no one
It also doesn’t help that TDF is dealing with its own internal governance disputes and tensions over how core developers are treated. I’ve supported TDF since its founding, but I find it concerning that an organization facing its own internal struggles is actively opposing a major open-source office project. It’s also hard to ignore that TDF now has its own stake in the online office space: a revived version of LibreOffice Online.
Really, instead of arguing over who’s more genuinely open-source, can’t we agree to compete in the marketplace rather than on social media? What’s the point of open-source office suite supporters fighting each other when Microsoft 365 and Google Workplace together control 96% of the online office market?
