Euro-Office Arrives, and the Licensing War Has Already Started

Eight European open-source companies stood on a stage in Berlin on March 27 and announced Euro-Office, a fork of ONLYOFFICE designed to replace Microsoft productivity software across EU governments and enterprises. The coalition includes Nextcloud, IONOS, OpenProject, XWiki, Soverin, Abilian, bTactic, and the EuroStack Initiative. Their target: the 77% of EU public sector desks that still run Microsoft 365.

What They're Building

Euro-Office is an AGPLv3-licensed fork of ONLYOFFICE Docs that handles documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with full Microsoft format compatibility (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX). IONOS and Nextcloud co-lead the project, with each company hiring double-digit developer teams. The plan is to replace Collabora Online, the LibreOffice-based editor currently bundled with Nextcloud Hub, with Euro-Office as the default. A tech preview is already on GitHub. The first stable release is targeted for summer 2026.

The timing is not accidental. Finnish MEP Aura Salla warned at this year's Open Source Policy Summit that "the EU runs on Microsoft" and that "the US could turn us off inside one hour." That is not hyperbole when you look at procurement data: Microsoft appears in 89 to 100 percent of EU government procurement documents. One German state, Schleswig-Holstein, has migrated 80% of its government workplaces to LibreOffice and cut 15 million EUR per year in licensing costs. Euro-Office wants to make that kind of switch the default, not the exception. But before it has shipped a single stable release, the project is already fighting on two fronts.

Three Million Lines of Disputed Code

ONLYOFFICE, the Latvian company whose codebase Euro-Office forks, published a blog post within days accusing the coalition of violating the AGPLv3 license. The complaints are specific: Euro-Office allegedly stripped ONLYOFFICE branding without complying with Section 7 attribution requirements, failed to provide proper credit to the original developers, and did not fully meet open-source distribution obligations. ONLYOFFICE is demanding "full and immediate compliance." No lawsuit has been filed, but the language is lawyered.

Then came the counter-salvo from an unexpected direction. Collabora Productivity, whose product Euro-Office is designed to replace inside Nextcloud, published its own response questioning whether three million lines of code "apparently written by a large team of Russians, substantially owned and controlled by a Russian citizen" belong at the heart of a European sovereignty project. Collabora called ONLYOFFICE's modified AGPLv3 licensing "open washing," citing criticism from the Open Source Initiative. Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek pushed back by saying his team conducted a full code audit and "can vouch for our version." He also dismissed Collabora's LibreOffice-based approach: "LibreOffice is 35 years old and no longer the most innovative and fluid."

This is not a story of European tech solidarity. It is a three-way fracture inside the EU open-source ecosystem, with Euro-Office caught between the company whose code it forked and the company whose product it wants to kill.

Why This Matters

The Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), expected to be formally proposed on May 27, will likely establish open-source preferences for EU public sector procurement and create binding cloud sovereignty requirements. Euro-Office is positioning itself as the default beneficiary of that regulation. IONOS CEO Achim Weiss said the product targets "the entire market, from small businesses to the public sector."

But unresolved IP disputes are exactly the kind of vendor risk that digital sovereignty is supposed to eliminate. If European governments start writing purchase orders for a product whose licensing status is contested by the original developer, they are trading one dependency for another kind of uncertainty. The real test for Euro-Office is not whether it can match Microsoft's feature set. It is whether the coalition can resolve its own internal conflicts before the procurement window opens.

Sources

• Nextcloud: Industry initiative launches Euro-Office
• Tech.eu: Europe builds Microsoft-compatible Euro-Office
• Heise: Nextcloud and IONOS develop Euro-Office
• ONLYOFFICE: License violations in Euro-Office
• Collabora: A European office suite?
• The Register: MEP warns EU runs on Microsoft