Europe's answer to Microsoft Office comes amid bitter ownership and licensing dispute

In an effort to reduce dependence on American technology such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, a group of leading European cloud service providers have joined forces to launch the Euro-Office project. The aim was to create a fully sovereign solution that would be under the control of European authorities and companies, while maintaining full compatibility with popular Microsoft formats (docx, xlsx, pptx).

The developers of the Euro-Office office suite justify their decision to separate from the parent project for several reasons. They cite geopolitical risks as a key problem, arguing that, despite being officially headquartered in Latvia, OnlyOffice is still deeply rooted in Russia, where most of its developers reportedly live. In addition, the consortium claims that cooperation with OnlyOffice was made difficult because external contributions to the code were often rejected and development plans were non-transparent. Euro-Office wants to remove these obstacles and offer a tool that is “made in Europe” and tailored to the needs of the public sector and critical infrastructure.

However, OnlyOffice did not remain silent. The company strongly denied the allegations of Russian influence and accused the consortium of violating the AGPLv3 (GNU Affero General Public License). According to them, Euro-Office is using their intellectual property without proper attribution, which they call theft. The dispute even went so far as to end their eight-year partnership with Nextcloud, accusing it of attempting to take over employees and undermining trust in the open source community.

Despite the legal storm, the development of the Euro-Office office suite continues. The first final version 1.0 is announced for the summer of 2026, and the code is already available on the GitHub platform. The project promises a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and PDF editor that will be integrated directly into secure European cloud services. Whether Euro-Office will truly become a serious alternative to Microsoft or get bogged down in protracted court battles remains to be seen, but Europe's clear desire for its own software has never been more evident.