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.
And saying a free version will not come despite the FAQ saying it is…
Why can’t they just sponsor libreoffice rather than start their own?
Because then commercial companies couldn’t earn a fortune in the process, of course! /s
Sadly, this is probably why.
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.
Well 35 years is just false, even if you count it as a continuation from StarOffice that would be 41 years, I can’t work out where they got 35 from, but that’s a stupid argument anyway, it’s only as old as its last version, OnlyOffice lacks features. I’m not impressed by any of 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.
I see that Euro-Office claims to support ODF and that doesn’t seem like a direct response to them. My criticism still stands though.
LibreOffice:
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.
Euro-Office and Office EU (office.eu) are not the same project.
How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki: Euro-Office is more of an integration component. It merely handles document editing itself. Storage, as well as navigation, permissions and sharing logic has to be offered by a platform it is integrated in, like Proton Docs, Nextcloud Hub or OpenProject. – https://github.com/Euro-Office/.github/blob/main/profile/README.md#faq
It’s just straight up Nextcloud with a bunch of app integration
… 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.
Maybe it’s because of GNU licenses or something.
