// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
LibreOffice slams Euro-Office as ‘de facto ally’ of Microsoft
ONLYOFFICE fork uses proprietary OOXML document format
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.
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.”
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.