An open letter from the Document Foundation argues that Euro-Office is not what it claims to be — and could strengthen the Microsoft ecosystem.
Dear office suite users,
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In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is “launched” as the first open source office suite developed in Europe. We feel obliged — reluctantly, since open source should be based on transparency, not fraud — to correct this claim. The first open source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on the StarOffice source code, followed by LibreOffice since 2010.
These are two genuine open source office suites, built from source code originating in Europe. They are not a free clone of MS Office whose source code is not disclosed, nor a product renamed out of pure opportunism to ride the current wave of Digital Domination.
It is worth remembering that many of those who support Digital Sovereignty today were silent in 2006, when the ISO/IEC ODF open standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced. Not only have they not listened to us all these years, but in some cases they have greeted us with a condescending smile.
If we can talk about Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, 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 collapse, and continued to develop the only truly open and standardized format that guarantees Digital Sovereignty, as it provides full user control over content.
Document formats are a subject that continues to be rife with misinformation. This is understandable from the perspective of Microsoft, which developed and controls the awful proprietary OOXML format , designed precisely to prevent Digital Sovereignty by maintaining content lockdown. It is much less understandable from the perspective of companies that claim to support open source, such as those promoting Euro-Office.
Euro-Office uses the fully proprietary OOXML document format by default, which was developed and controlled exclusively by Microsoft. This makes the application a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content-blocking strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and away from Europe.
So, despite what is being written about supporting Euro-Office — the last of the office suites developed in Europe, not the first — the announcement is not against Microsoft. On the contrary, 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.
LibreOffice/The Document Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
