A group of European technology companies, including Nextcloud, Ionos, and Proton, has released a preview of an OnlyOffice-based open-source productivity suite called Euro-Office. The project aims to provide a locally developed alternative to Microsoft Office for European governments and businesses. The stable version 1.0 is expected to be released later this summer, and the preview is available on GitHub.

Euro-Office offers features such as a text editor, spreadsheet editor, presentation tool, and PDF editor. It supports Microsoft Office formats (DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX) and open standards like ODF.

Licensing Dispute Over 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), and OnlyOffice argues that the additional conditions in Section 7 of this license cannot be separated from the main license.

Any argument that a modified or derivative version of the software can be distributed under a 'pure' AGPLv3 license is legally unfounded, stated OnlyOffice.

The right to create and distribute derivative works is based solely on the granting of the license, and this is conditional and indivisible. The Euro-Office developers have not publicly responded to this legal claim, and the dispute remains unresolved.

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, it is reported that a large part of the development team is located in Russia. The developers express that this situation has raised concerns about trust and transparency, complicating collaboration given the current geopolitical tensions.

The second reason is technical: the Euro-Office team claims that contributing to OnlyOffice is impossible or significantly discouraging, and that the build instructions are unreliable, outdated, or simply broken. OnlyOffice rejects this characterization of its development processes but acknowledges that the fork could impact its corporate business.

Euro-Office and Europe's Digital Sovereignty Goals

Euro-Office is part of efforts to achieve digital sovereignty; public institutions and businesses aim to gain more control over the software, management, and development plans of tools used in critical infrastructures. The project challenges both US-based productivity suites and existing open-source options managed outside of Europe.

Currently, the licensing dispute between Euro-Office and OnlyOffice remains unresolved, and OnlyOffice has not initiated any legal action regarding the alleged license violations.