Euro‑Office Sets June 9 Launch in Bid for EU Digital Sovereignty

Backed by major European vendors, Euro‑Office takes on Microsoft, Google Docs, and OnlyOffice — and our screenshots show how the new sovereign suite is shaping up.

Nextcloud, the Germany-based developer of the eponymous platform for running private clouds, announced on Thursday that Euro-Office will officially be ready for prime time on June 9, with downloads becoming available on the project’s GitHub page. On the same day, Nextcloud will be releasing Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, which will include Euro-Office as an alternative to Collabora, the LibreOffice-based self-hosted productivity suite that for the time being remains Nextcloud Hub’s default productivity suite.

This is a quick turnaround. It comes almost exactly two months after the March 27 announcement of Euro-Office as a fork of OnlyOffice, an open source productivity suite that’s known for its faithful rendering of OOXML, Microsoft Office’s open but obscured document format. The proposed project is meant to be a European answer to Office and Google Docs, with the name tying it directly to the EU’s digital sovereignty efforts, which have become increasingly important as Europe’s once dependable relationship with the US continues to destabilize under Trump.

Like OnlyOffice, there will eventually be three versions of Euro-Office, starting with a version meant to be hosted on a server and used online through a browser, which is what will be released next week by Nextcloud (which, full disclosure, is a FOSS Force Platinum Sponsor). Down the road there’ll be a version to install locally on a PC or laptop, as well as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Who’s Behind Euro-Office

Euro-Office is the result of a collaboration between numerous European companies and projects, largely centered around Eurostack, a cloud sovereignty initiative proposing a federated, interoperable cloud stack. In addition to Nextcloud, the companies involved include IONOS, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian, BTactic, OpenXchange, and Office.eu.

Many of these same companies are providing the Euro-Office project with an increasing amount of development resources, which are “creating jobs and driving innovation in Europe.” In April, Nextcloud and IONOS began hiring a team to develop and maintain Euro-Office.

“First positions have been filled,” Nextcloud said.

Why Fork OnlyOffice

If all you’re trying to do is establish digital sovereignty, it would be easier to start promoting OnlyOffice as a very capable European alternative to US-based office productivity suites, rather than forking the project, which requires building a brand from scratch. However, many Europeans have long had questions about OnlyOffice that predate the EU’s current rush to establish digital sovereignty.

Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and Trump’s dismantling of US-EU relations), FOSS Force began hearing from EU-based software vendors who questioned whether restrictions added to OnlyOffice’s license qualified as open source. Other questions pertinent to sovereignty were raised over whether the company is actually based in the EU member state of Latvia — as the company claims — instead of Russia, the native country of Lev Bannov, the company’s founder and CEO. His official residence is Istanbul, and OnlyOffice says he holds dual Russia/Turkey citizenship.

While many of the issues concerning nationality remain open for discussion, they don’t negate questions about where his loyalties lie. OnlyOffice has long said it’s developed by Ascensio System SIA, headquartered in Riga, Latvia, while community investigations have shown that Ascensio System SIA started as a subsidiary of Russian‑based New Communication Technologies.

OnlyOffice’s Response

It turns out that suspicions about the restrictions that OnlyOffice puts on its AGPL license were valid, and were a way of reaping the benefits of appearing to be open source without actually being open. Within days of the announcement that a fork was in the works, OnlyOffice publicly claimed that the project can’t be forked without running afoul of its licensing restrictions. One restriction, for example, requires keeping the company’s logo intact when redistributing the code, although the company refuses to make trademark rights available.

Although there’s been no court ruling on this yet, a wide spectrum of open source experts, including the Free Software Foundation, say that the restrictions are not compatible with the AGPL license, and therefore unenforceable.

In addition to legal threats regarding its license restrictions, it has actively made its open core approach more palatable. Last week, with the release of OnlyOffice 9.4, it announced that it was removing the 20-connection limit from its free Community Edition, while adding editor, spreadsheet, and presentation updates.

Trouble Among Office Apps

All of this comes at a time when the normally complacent open source office productivity suites are in turmoil, mostly centered on The Document Foundation, the Germany-based organization behind LibreOffice, and Collabora, a UK-based online productivity app built on LibreOffice’s code.

The two have recently been involved in a rift with enough palace intrigue and cloak and dagger aspects to make for a good spy novel. March’s Euro-Office announcement only fueled the fire, mainly because the newly forked application and the widespread industry support it’s receiving in the EU brings competition to both Collabora and LibreOffice, which have each dominated their respective open source software markets for years.

LibreOffice has been attempting to take the high road as far as Euro-Office goes. While lauding the project’s concept, it’s criticized its focus on OOXML compatibility over the more open ODF document format.

A Cornerstone to EU Digital Sovereignty

The criticism by LibreOffice points to an unfortunate fact. Euro-Office’s ability to faithfully render Microsoft’s purposefully obscured document format is precisely what makes this project important to EU digital sovereignty efforts. In order to get continental offices on the EU tech bandwagon, there has to be a “made in the EU” product that can work and play well with Redmond’s Office products.

This will be important during the transition period in the EU to get companies on board, and afterward for doing business with non-EU countries such as the United States, which are unlikely to be adopting Euro-Office en masse anytime soon. Euro-Office’s inclusion in the upcoming Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring release will serve as an introduction of the office suite, which at first might seem to be a bit of a Collabora and OnlyOffice also-ran.

After that, Nextcloud and its partners plan to fast-track its availability, and hopefully its adoption. Customers of IONOS’s Managed Nextcloud service will be able to install it immediately after the launch, and it will rollout to its Nextcloud Workspace offering later in the summer. The French company XWiki expects to integrate it in the fourth quarter, and Netherlands-based Office.eu also plans a rollout.

“Our top priority was to provide a version, that people could actually work with,” Nextcloud’s CEO, Frank Karlitschek, said in a statement. “First, we had to clean up the code, implement some security updates, and integrate Euro-Office with existing solutions. The next step is to work on the desktop, mobile, apps and integration features. For a truly sovereign solution, it is also important to fully support open standards such as ODF formats, and this will be on top of the agenda for the next release.”