A group of European tech companies including NextCloud, IonOS and Proton have released a preview of euro-officeAn open-source productivity suite based on OnlyOffice. The goal of this project is to provide European governments and businesses with a locally developed alternative to Microsoft Office. A stable 1.0 version is expected later this summer, and a preview is available on GitHub.
Euro-Office features a word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation tools, and PDF editor. It supports open standards like ODF as well as Microsoft Office formats like DOCX, PPTX and XLSX.
Licensing dispute over Euro-Office fork
OnlyOffice has publicly challenged the legality of the fork. The project’s code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), which OnlyOffice argues contains additional terms in section 7 that cannot be severed from the main license.
“Any argument that a modified or derivative version of the software can be distributed under a ‘pure’ AGPLv3 license, without these additional terms, is legally baseless,” OnlyOffice said.
“The right to create and distribute derivative works flows solely from the license grant, which is conditional and inalienable.” Euro-Office developers have not responded publicly to this legal claim, and the dispute remains unresolved.
Due to Euro-Office fork
Euro-Office developers give two main reasons for creating a fork rather than contributing directly to OnlyOffice. The first is geopolitical: although OnlyOffice is officially based in Latvia, its development team is described by the consortium as still mostly based in Russia. Developers say this raises trust and transparency concerns that make collaboration difficult given current geopolitical tensions.
The second reason is technical: the Euro-Office team claims that contributing to OnlyOffice is “impossible or highly discouraged” and that the creation instructions are “unreliable, outdated, or simply broken”. OnlyOffice disputes the characterization of its development processes but acknowledges that the fork could impact its enterprise business.
Euro-Office and Europe’s digital sovereignty goals
The Euro-Office is part of a wider European effort to achieve digital sovereignty, in which public agencies and businesses aim to take greater control over the software, governance and development plans of equipment used in critical infrastructure. The project challenges both US-based productivity suites and existing open-source alternatives governed out of Europe.
As of now, the licensing dispute between Euro-Office and OnlyOffice remains unresolved, with no legal action confirmed by OnlyOffice over alleged licensing violations.
