ONLYOFFICE Gets Forked as "Made in Europe", Sparks Licensing and Trust Debate

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 01, 2026,
updated Apr 03, 2026

Quoting: ONLYOFFICE Gets Forked as "Made in Europe", Sparks Licensing and Trust Debate —

There is a new open source office suite. It’s called Euro-Office.

As the name suggests, it is a European effort and is primarily meant for European organizations and governments.

Before you get too excited, let me clarify that it is not your typical office suite like LibreOffice that you install on desktop systems. It is designed more for providing collaborative document portals for organizations.

In other words, it’s an online office suite that can be deployed within an organization and accessed via the web. It can also be integrated into other products, like Nextcloud to provide document editing capabilities.

The project has been initiated by Nextcloud and IONOS. Nextcloud is a well-known open source collaboration platform, and IONOS is primarily a server infrastructure provider.

Read on

Direct:

• Euro-Office · GitHub

  Euro-Office is open source and developed in public by a community of individuals and organizations. We welcome contributions from anyone, including individuals, companies, public organizations and non-profits. We encourage anyone who cares about free and open source, modern office technology to get involved! Our goal is to have as few barriers as possible to contribution.

Also:

• LibreOffice vs ONLYOFFICE - Which One Is Right For You?

  When it comes to open-source office suites, we're not short on options, despite what it may seem at first glance. Yet, without a doubt, two names stand head and shoulders above all others. LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE sit unchallenged as the most popular office solutions built and distributed on open principles. Both are solid in their own rights, and both have loyal communities that swear by them and no others. But between the two, which one is right for you?

  In this article, we'll have a closer look at both office suites, with a friendly comparison of their strengths and weaknesses and what makes them truly unique, especially compared to each other. By the end, you'll be better equipped to choose which one you'd prefer, if you so desire.

The Register MS:

• Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

  European outfits Ionos and Nextcloud have launched Euro-Office, a fork of the OnlyOffice cloud-based productivity suite aimed at orgs with qualms around sovereignty, provoking an angry response from the original developer.

  A few days ago, a "coalition of European enterprises and community organizations," fronted by German self-hosted cloud vendor Nextcloud, together launched Euro-Office, a "true sovereign office suite" and "replacement for Microsoft Office with intuitive interface and strong compatibility."

  So far, Euro-Office is so new that rather than a homepage, its backers are instead sending people to the project page on GitHub – although a few Wikipedians already had time to write a Wikipedia article about it.

  Euro-Office is not brand new code that appeared from nowhere. Rather, it is a fork of the existing OnlyOffice suite, which we've looked at a couple of times, such as when OnlyOffice 7.2 appeared in 2022, and the following year, when we compared OnlyOffice 7.3 with the Chinese freeware suite WPS Office.

Planet GNOME:

• Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

  What is easy to see is the huge drop in corporate affiliation - along with all the business experience that brings. The added '2026' is for the current 'rump' board which continues to over-stay its term and has also lost several of its most popular developer members - including Eike - recently of RedHat (because of a person tragedy) and Bjoern. In 'Interested' I include those with a business interest in LibreOffice who are not part of a larger corporate, one: Laszlo is the last coder on the board.

  One of the major surprises of the 2024 election is the 'TDF' chunk in which I bucket paid TDF staff, and those closely related to them. The current chair of the TDF board (Eliane) who manages the Executive Director (ED) is curiously related to a staff member who is managed by the (ED) - arguably an extremely poor governance practice. Having three TDF affiliated directors is also in contradiction of the statutes.

  It is also worth noting that for over two years, no Collaboran or any of our partners have been on the TDF board. It was hoped that this would give ample time and space to address any of the issues left from previous boards.

Another One From It's FOSS:

• LibreOffice Drama: TDF Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep

  TDF's Membership Committee has removed all Collabora staff and partners from membership in one move, covering over 30 developers. This includes, per Collabora's own count, seven of LibreOffice's all-time top ten core committers who are still active.

  To make things more complicated, this is only the latest in a series of departures. Several of TDF's original founders have already stopped being members over recent years, and of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are now paid TDF staff who aren't writing core code.

  And it doesn't stop there. Collabora takes aim at a series of governance decisions it considers indefensible. Board appointments, it says, favored non-technical staff over experienced contributors, and the revival of shelved online code now puts TDF in direct competition with its own biggest contributor.