A group of European tech companies, including Nextcloud, Ionos, and Proton, has released a preview of Euro-Office, an open-source productivity suite based on OnlyOffice. The project aims to offer European governments and businesses a locally developed alternative to Microsoft Office. A stable 1.0 version is expected later this summer, and the preview is available on GitHub.
Euro-Office features a word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation tool, and PDF editor. It supports Microsoft Office formats such as DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX, along with open standards like ODF.
Licensing Dispute Over the 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 includes additional conditions in Section 7 that cannot be separated from the main license.
“Any argument that a modified or derivative version of the software could be distributed under a ‘pure’ AGPLv3 license, without these additional conditions, is legally unfounded,” OnlyOffice stated.
“The right to create and distribute derivative works comes solely from the license grant, which is conditional and indivisible.” The Euro-Office developers have not publicly responded to this legal claim, and the dispute remains unresolved as of now.
Reasons for the Euro-Office Fork
The Euro-Office developers cite two main reasons for creating a fork instead of 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 located in Russia. The 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that contributing to OnlyOffice is “impossible or heavily discouraged” and that build instructions are “unreliable, outdated or simply broken.” OnlyOffice disputes the characterization of its development processes but admits that the fork could impact its enterprise business.
Euro-Office and Europe’s Digital Sovereignty Goals
Euro-Office is part of a broader European effort to achieve digital sovereignty, with public agencies and businesses aiming for more control over the software, governance, and development plans of tools used in critical infrastructure. The project challenges both US-based productivity suites and existing open-source options that are governed outside Europe.
As of now, the licensing dispute between Euro-Office and OnlyOffice remains unresolved, with no legal action confirmed by OnlyOffice over the alleged license violations.
