Euro-Office Launches, But Europe's Open-Source Community Is Already at War Over It
A new European open-source office suite arrived this week with bold promises of digital sovereignty and freedom from American tech giants. But before the ink was even dry, it found itself caught between a licensing dispute with the Russian-owned software it was built on and a broadside from the continent’s own open-source establishment. Welcome to Euro-Office.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 12.6.2026 | Photo by Adobe Stock Photos
A coalition of European technology firms has released the first stable version of Euro-Office, a web-based open-source office suite positioned as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. The launch, however, has been overshadowed by fierce criticism from within the open-source world itself.
The first stable version was made publicly available on GitHub on 9 June 2026. The project had been announced three months earlier, when a coalition of nine European companies gathered at the Bundestag in Berlin to declare they were forking OnlyOffice. The consortium includes IONOS, Nextcloud, Proton, XWiki, OpenProject, EuroStack, Soverin, Abilian, and BTactic.
The suite offers a word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation tool, and PDF editor, supporting both Microsoft formats such as DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX, as well as open standards such as ODF. Real-time collaborative editing is supported across all three document types, and mobile and desktop apps are currently in development.
Why fork OnlyOffice?
According to Euro-Office’s own GitHub page, open collaboration with OnlyOffice had become impossible for several reasons: the company typically does not review or accept pull requests, build instructions are unreliable or outdated, and development lacks transparency.
There were also geopolitical concerns. OnlyOffice is a Russian-owned company, and many European institutions specifically want software free of any potential foreign-state influence. Nextcloud and IONOS also pointed to OnlyOffice’s more modern architecture and codebase as preferable to LibreOffice and its browser variant, Collabora.
The launch has not been without legal turbulence. OnlyOffice suspended its eight-year partnership with Nextcloud following the announcement, arguing the fork violates the GNU Affero General Public License v3 by repackaging its code without retaining required branding, logos, and attribution.
Nextcloud strongly rejected the allegations, arguing that the licensing conditions cited by OnlyOffice are not legally enforceable. According to Nextcloud’s Frank Karlitschek, the dispute has since been settled, with appropriate source and brand notices now added to Euro-Office.
LibreOffice fires back
Even more pointed criticism has come from an unexpected direction: the established open-source camp. The release was met with a sharply worded response from The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice. Co-founder Italo Vignoli accused Euro-Office of promoting sovereignty for itself while de facto supporting Microsoft’s lock-in strategies.
“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,” Vignoli wrote in an open letter, adding that control therefore remains firmly in Redmond, strengthening Microsoft’s strategy against Europe’s digital sovereignty.
The Document Foundation also disputed Euro-Office’s claim to be the “first European open-source office suite,” pointing to OpenOffice.org, launched in 2001 from StarOffice’s European codebase, and LibreOffice itself, introduced in 2010. LibreOffice went further, describing Euro-Office as a “freeware clone” of Microsoft Office, accusing it of mimicking Microsoft’s interface and workflows rather than offering a genuine alternative.
Mixed reactions in the developer community
Reaction among developers has been varied. On Hacker News, some users welcomed practical improvements. One commenter noted that Euro-Office had disabled OnlyOffice’s paid licence gate on mobile web browser editing, making it possible for the first time to send collaboration links to friends and family without requiring them to download a separate phone app. Others were less convinced, questioning whether the project represented genuine innovation or simply repackaged an existing product under a European banner.
Euro-Office is integrated into Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring from day one, giving it immediate reach across thousands of self-hosted deployments. Competition from the established open-source camp may be on the horizon too, as LibreOffice announced a strategic shift at the end of May.
Whatever the outcome of these early disputes, the arrival of Euro-Office marks something significant. For the first time in years, a credible and well-funded coalition of European technology companies has united around a common goal: building the infrastructure for a genuinely independent digital Europe. The arguments over file formats and licensing are real, but they are also the growing pains of a continent finally taking its software future seriously. That, at least, is worth welcoming.
