A consortium of European technology companies such as Nextcloud, Ionos and Proton recently announced the launch of a new open source office suite "Euro-Office", which is regarded as the "European answer" to challenge Microsoft Office in the field of office software. It is also an important step for Europe to promote digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on US technology suppliers.Euro-Office is built directly on the code of the open source project OnlyOffice, providing functions such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDF editing. It is compatible with Microsoft formats such as docx, pptx, xlsx, and open standards such as ODF. The preview version is currently available on GitHub, and the official version 1.0 is expected to be released this summer.
The launch of Euro-Office is placed within Europe's larger "digital sovereignty" strategy, which aims to keep critical infrastructure, data and core productivity tools in the hands of local European companies and institutions as much as possible. For many government departments and enterprise users, local control over source code, governance structures, and product development routes is becoming as important as whether functionality is comparable to mature U.S. suites.
However, as soon as this new project was unveiled, it sparked fierce controversy around open source license compliance. The OnlyOffice project, the source of Euro-Office, publicly accused the fork of violating the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3) it adopted, believing that the other party improperly circumvented the additional conditions added under Section 7. OnlyOffice stressed in its statement that any suggestion that modified or derivative versions could be released under "pure" AGPLv3, excluding additional conditions imposed under Section 7, is "legally unsustainable," noting that the right to create and distribute derivative works derives entirely from the license grant, which is conditional and indivisible, so any derivative works based on the original OnlyOffice code must comply with all applicable license terms, including these additional conditions.
The debate surrounding Euro-Office also quickly extended to the level of trust and transparency. The Euro-Office developer pointed out in its GitHub repository that the OnlyOffice project has a Russian background and its R&D team is still mainly located in Russia, which is seen as an obstacle to cooperation amid current geopolitical tensions. In their view, the open source ecosystem essentially relies on global collaboration and trust, but when political tensions intensify, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain this trust. In addition, the lack of transparency in the project development process will further weaken external confidence. The Euro-Office team also claims that contributing code to OnlyOffice is "nearly impossible or extremely hindered" and criticizes the latter's build instructions as "unreliable, outdated, or even just plain bad."
OnlyOffice stated that the company has moved its operations to Latvia and did not agree with the description of the Russian background, but also admitted that the emergence of Euro-Office may have an impact on its business, especially on the core business model of enterprise deployment of collaborative office software. The current dispute highlights a core tension in the development of open source: on the one hand, the license gives anyone the right to fork the code; on the other hand, commercial interests, geopolitics and trust crises make these forks full of real conflicts.
For supporters of Euro-Office, the move is an important step toward independence for "Made in Europe" software, hoping to wean itself off dependence on suppliers in the United States and elsewhere in a key area of office software. For OnlyOffice, it's a reminder of how geopolitical distrust and license interpretation can turn open code into a battleground. The entire turmoil has once again made the delicate balance between software sovereignty, open source compliance and global collaboration a focus of debate in the European technology and policy circles.