The Document Foundation, steward of the long-running LibreOffice project, has denounced the brand-new Euro-Office alternative as an enemy of European digital sovereignty and, effectively, a Microsoft stooge.
Euro-Office launched this week as an open-source collaborative document editing component. The project is a fork of OnlyOffice, another open source Microsoft Office alternative which the Euro-Office team said was too closely connected to Russia.
In the Euro-Office documentation, the maintainers flag the code base as "being extensively reviewed and cleaned up, with the goal of making it easy to build and contribute to."
On the same day, the LibreOffice published an open letter addressed "to office suite users" that did not pull its punches.
"Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe," the letter reads.
The project "strengthens Microsoft’s strategy against European Digital Sovereignty, or, if you prefer, against the freedom of European users to control and manage their own content," it reiterated.
Euro-Office contributors rejected that characterisation.
Displacing Russia
The Euro-Office group bills itself as liberators of the OnlyOffice codebase, saying it forked that project because it is too hard to contribute to, lacks transparency, and is just too Russian.
