Why can’t they just sponsor libreoffice rather than start their own?
That was my first thought too. Apparently Euro-office is based on OnlyOffice. According to Nextcloud and IONOS “Libre Office is 35 years old and no longer the most innovative and fluid”. For more detail: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Microsoft-alternative-Nextcloud-and-Ionos-develop-open-source-Euro-Office-11228123.html. I would like to hear what The Document Foundation thinks about this.
Answering my own question, here is a link to a blog post from The Document Foundation, https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/27/odf-is-the-future-ooxml-is-the-past/. The criticism of The Document Foundation centers around the use of Microsoft OOXML format in OnlyOffice instead of the truly open ODF standard in LibreOffice.
Because then commercial companies couldn’t earn a fortune in the process, of course! /s
Sadly, this is probably why.
Q: Is that your plan with Office EU too? To sell it after a few years?
A: Tja, I am not sure about that. I can’t see that far into the future, I don’t know.
Q: So which apps don’t use Nextcloud?
A: Once we’re live, I’ll show you.
Q: Have you written any code around it yourselves?
A: A great deal has been written around it. (This is literally the whole answer to that question)
Q: Could you give an example of that? Will that be open source too?
Q: Well, look, you know what it is? I don’t really feel comfortable talking about this. You approached me. I’m saying: I’m not actually ready for this yet, because we’re sorting out a few things.
this looks a lot like that “European X alternative” named “W” which was vaporware. I wish journalist were more critical with the claims of these people.
Reading from Wikipedia: Euro-Office is an upcoming open-source office suite and collaborative software platform based on OnlyOffice that provides editors for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. The software includes web-based, desktop, and mobile applications designed for document creation, editing, and collaborative work
Ah, so it’s basically just OnlyOffice (and a few other apps?) in a wrapper, provided as a hosted solution.
LibreOffice:
… ok, obvious problems that need to be addressed (and why not make it a nonprofit?), but I’m honestly impressed Microslop doesn’t own all the domain extensions for the office domain.
