LibreOffice Questions Whether Euro-Office is Truly Sovereign

Before we dive into the topic at hand, you should know that Euro-Office is a new European productivity project by Nextcloud and IONOS, which was forked from ONLYOFFICE.

It is a self-hosted, web-based office suite built for organizations and governments that want collaborative document editing on their own infrastructure. A big part of it is to move away from an office suite with ties to Russia, which has triggered concerns over digital sovereignty.

Following that, The Document Foundation (TDF), the nonprofit behind LibreOffice, had put forward a question, asking what document format this suite would use as its native format.

They have received no reply and have put out a thank-you post to ODF contributors while taking a dig at Euro-Office's silence.

TDF isn't happy

Toward the end of March, TDF published an open letter to European citizens arguing that digital sovereignty is not as simple as switching office software vendors. Real sovereignty, TDF said, requires open document formats, open fonts, and continuity of expertise, none of which come automatically with a vendor switch.

Then came the issue of OOXML versus ODF. OOXML, the format used by Microsoft Office, is designed and controlled entirely by Microsoft. Any office suite that defaults to OOXML compatibility is still structurally dependent on decisions made in the U.S., regardless of where it is hosted.

ODF, the Open Document Format, is what TDF wants Euro-Office to commit to instead. It is an ISO standard, developed openly without a single company controlling it.

They also noted that Euro-Office's launch press release made no mention of ODF as a native format and asked publicly whether it would be the default for documents created and shared between European public bodies.

What does this mean?

Euro-Office's GitHub does list ODF formats alongside DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX, so it's not like they've excluded open formats entirely. But their FAQ frames the whole thing around "great MS compatibility," which is a problem.

Supporting a format and making it your native default are two different things. The distinction is relevant for any European institution that actually wants to break the dependency on Microsoft rather than just move it to a different server rack.

Whether Euro-Office addresses this directly or keeps quiet, TDF's question is now out there. And given that Germany has already mandated ODF by law, it's not a question that's going away anytime soon.