Italo Vignoli (LibreOffice) accuses Euro-Office of reinforcing Microsoft’s control in Europe

The co-founder of The Document Foundation, Italo Vignoli, has highlighted the role that both LibreOffice and OpenOffice have played in European digital sovereignty as “two authentic open source office suites”, compared to Euro-Office, which he accuses of being “a free clone of Microsoft Office” and of reinforcing the sovereignty of the American company.

This Tuesday the stable version of Euro-Office will be available, a project led by IONOS and Nextcloud that offers an open source office ‘suite’ to try to compete with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace in the European market.

Its developers see it as a “truly open, transparent and sovereign solution for collaborative document editing”, but the enthusiasm generated by this office suite is not shared by Vignoli, who has questioned the claim that it is “the first open source office suite developed in Europe.”

In an open letter, LibreOffice’s Marketing, Public Relations and Media Relations Director has claimed the “two authentic open source office suites, developed from source code originating in Europe”: the first that appeared, OpenOffice, in 2001; and LibreOffice, which arrived in 2010.

“If today we can talk about digital sovereignty in Europe, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and the members of the LibreOffice community in general, who kept the flag of open source office suites high when everyone predicted their disappearance, and who continued to develop the only truly open and standard format that guarantees digital sovereignty, since it provides full user control over the content,” he expressed.

Vignoli contrasts them with Euro-Office, which he describes as a “free clone of MS Office whose code origin is unknown” and a “product that has been reinvented out of pure opportunism to take advantage of the current wave of digital sovereignty.”

As it explains, Euro-Office uses the Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, which was developed and owned by Microsoft. It is introduced as a standard for word processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, and is used by default in Microsoft 365 programs.

It is contrasted with OpenDocument Format (.odt, .ods, .odp), an open and universal standard published in 2005 that is at the base of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and managed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information (OASIS).

By using OOXML, Vignoli accuses Euro-Office of being “an ally of Microsoft”, claiming that it “reinforces Microsoft’s strategy against European digital sovereignty or, if you prefer, against the freedom of European users to control and manage their own content.”

Euro-Office cannot be used independently, as explained by its developers, which also include Proton and OpenProject. In reality, it is a solution designed to be a web application integrated into another product that manages documents.

Users can view, edit, and collaborate with others on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and even PDF files. Specifically, Euro-Office is compatible with DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, ODT, ODS, ODP, TXT file formats, among others.

However, for the storage of these files, Euro-Office depends on the platform in which it is integrated, as does the permissions and options for sharing files.