I’m not familiar with the project, but can anyone clarify what it means that it’s not intended to be used standalone and instead built into other projects? What’s the intention / expectation?
Your question is somewhat answered there: "What is Euro-Office?", "How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki?"
However especially "Why was a new office suite needed" is telling.
True EU sovereignty spells: the only requirement is, it must work "greatly" with MS. Oh well, in the past libreoffice and the likes mostly chose open formats as their reason.
If EU sovereignty means simply being a rip off, you get into trouble my friends. This is Chinas business and doesn't spell innovation nor does it mean optimism for the future.
You'll never convince companies and users to leave MS Office if they cannot simply use and open their billions of "excel files that should have been a database".
Ensuring that you can do exactly that means the barrier for switching is significantly lower.
> but developed to be [...] integrated in another product that handles documents, for example a file sharing solution, an online wiki, a project management tool and so on
It looks like it only provides the document editing part and you need an app around it to actually open the document from a filesystem and provide its content to this editing interface, and take the output and save it back to the filesystem? (Filesystem, or whatever persistent storage medium)
VS Code is built on top of the general-purpose Monaco editor component that's used by a bunch of other projects. This thing is basically meant to be the Monaco of rich-text.
When they don't even bother to make a proper example screenshot for their headline image, it's hard to think of it as quality software.
My impression is that FOSS people don't use Office software very much. So are they fit to develop Office software? You need to use something extensively yourself, or do careful and proper back-and-forth with real users if you want to make a quality product.
Immediate quality of life improvement: Euro-Office disabled Only-Office's paid license gate on mobile web browser editing. I can finally send collaboration links to family and friends without them needing to download the only-office phone app to edit the document.
It would be more interesting to see the release of the desktop application of open-source Euro-Office because the CEF binary used in "open-source" OnlyOffice desktop application is proprietary.
I have requested [1] the source of the CEF binary for at least two times, with no luck.
Why are we still focusing on docx so much? Is anybody printing these at all? If not, I have to assume people are putting information in a big free text field, arranging the text like they sit at a type writer, and then other people have to extract the information from the same free text field. There has got to be a better solution for whatever people are trying to achieve with documents.
Feels illegal under EU GDPR rules. I believe the accept and reject buttons should be equal size and style. Pay to eject, I’m not sure if that is illegal.
I can't help but notice that this, in effect, establishes collaboration between EU and Russian devs over a common open-source office suite, because both projects can easily copy future changes from each other. The irony is staggering, given the war and the public rhetoric.
> Pursuant to Section 7 of AGPLv3, the copyright holder is expressly entitled to impose additional conditions. In the case of ONLYOFFICE, such conditions include, in particular:
>the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));
>the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).
In other words you must use our logo and you must not use our logo. Good luck enforcing that.
Yes, but they can't do anything about it anyway. The FSF resolution on this matter, though, essentially means that they might just as well pull Euro-Office patches into OnlyOffice. So in the end, the product will be formed by combined effort.
The codebase will diverge quickly; the Russian one is heavily obfuscated with s ton of Russian in it and obscure commit messages. A large portion of prep work by Nextcloud was cleaning and translating. OnlyOffice was also known for refusing PRs, too.
War is between governments. A bad actor might as well lie that they're not Russian. If anything this is a good thing. Lets not make war define who we work with
Hard disagree. The war has been at least tacitly supported by the majority of the Russian public (via enlistment, taxation or just acquiescence) and it's very explicitly being waged against the Ukrainian public (via killing, occupation, expropriation etc).
"Define who we work with" is basically the point of sanctions. Unless you think they're too robust too, and we should limit ourselves to strongly worded postcards?
Wait how does it establish collaboration? Because its opensource so anyone can copy the source code? If so, thats a pretty weak, and disengenuous argument. Is the US collaborating with russia because russians can use the internet and darpa funded its initial RnD?
Euro-Office codebase will, obviously, not diverge significantly from the original product. If they planned fundamental changes, they would have started from scratch because taking over a huge project and rewriting its basis is an ever more daunting undertaking.
As such, any future patches to both codebases should be trivial to copy from one another, which essentially makes it collaboration.
https://github.com/Euro-Office
I’m not familiar with the project, but can anyone clarify what it means that it’s not intended to be used standalone and instead built into other projects? What’s the intention / expectation?
The project's FAQ are kinda enlightening: https://github.com/Euro-Office#faq
Your question is somewhat answered there: "What is Euro-Office?", "How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki?"
However especially "Why was a new office suite needed" is telling.
True EU sovereignty spells: the only requirement is, it must work "greatly" with MS. Oh well, in the past libreoffice and the likes mostly chose open formats as their reason.
If EU sovereignty means simply being a rip off, you get into trouble my friends. This is Chinas business and doesn't spell innovation nor does it mean optimism for the future.
You'll never convince companies and users to leave MS Office if they cannot simply use and open their billions of "excel files that should have been a database".
Ensuring that you can do exactly that means the barrier for switching is significantly lower.
> but developed to be [...] integrated in another product that handles documents, for example a file sharing solution, an online wiki, a project management tool and so on
It looks like it only provides the document editing part and you need an app around it to actually open the document from a filesystem and provide its content to this editing interface, and take the output and save it back to the filesystem? (Filesystem, or whatever persistent storage medium)
It's a WOPI app. Designed for embedding microsoft 365 office app in other web apps, but other people implement it. There's callabria, and this.
You'd use it to connect nextcloud to one of these providers. Probably some other enterprise apps I don't know about can use it to edit documents.
VS Code is built on top of the general-purpose Monaco editor component that's used by a bunch of other projects. This thing is basically meant to be the Monaco of rich-text.
When they don't even bother to make a proper example screenshot for their headline image, it's hard to think of it as quality software.
My impression is that FOSS people don't use Office software very much. So are they fit to develop Office software? You need to use something extensively yourself, or do careful and proper back-and-forth with real users if you want to make a quality product.
Immediate quality of life improvement: Euro-Office disabled Only-Office's paid license gate on mobile web browser editing. I can finally send collaboration links to family and friends without them needing to download the only-office phone app to edit the document.
It would be more interesting to see the release of the desktop application of open-source Euro-Office because the CEF binary used in "open-source" OnlyOffice desktop application is proprietary.
I have requested [1] the source of the CEF binary for at least two times, with no luck.
[1]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE-data/build_tools_data/issues/4
Why are we still focusing on docx so much? Is anybody printing these at all? If not, I have to assume people are putting information in a big free text field, arranging the text like they sit at a type writer, and then other people have to extract the information from the same free text field. There has got to be a better solution for whatever people are trying to achieve with documents.
Because it’s the default. And you can’t beat MS’ distribution
Related from the Document Foundation:
An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/06/08/an-open-...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451427)
It can't possibly be a worse user experience than Microsoft CoPilot Teams Office 365 Copilot with AI Co-Pilot so I say bring on the eurocrats.
Who is funding development of it?
Nextcloud which is one of the most popular Dropbox alternatives for homelab folks.
In fact, there will be a plugin on day one. There are others
Related:
Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490715
Ironically this website will not allow access unless you agree to data harvesting or pay up.
What do you mean? I didn’t get a modal or banner
you must have already agreed and forgotten about it.
clear all your cookies from heise and see what happens.
Chrome's Reading mode avoids this.
likewise on firefox
You can zap the element in Firefox with uBlock Origin
Feels illegal under EU GDPR rules. I believe the accept and reject buttons should be equal size and style. Pay to eject, I’m not sure if that is illegal.
it is illegal. see the other comments below.
what's most grating is that heise as a technical publication that is much more familiar with these issues should really know about this.
The pay to eject is illegal under gdpr
https://noyb.eu/en/court-decides-pay-or-okay-derstandardat-i...
NOYB doing all the good work once more
oh finally, we were just talking about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444803
here is another one (from the above link)
https://noyb.eu/en/nordic-media-giant-schibsted-switches-pay...
[flagged]
I can't help but notice that this, in effect, establishes collaboration between EU and Russian devs over a common open-source office suite, because both projects can easily copy future changes from each other. The irony is staggering, given the war and the public rhetoric.
It doesn't seem like a pleasant, bilateral collaboration since Russian developers do not seem pleased about the Euro-Office initiative.[0]
[0]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE#%EF%B8%8F-legal-note
> Pursuant to Section 7 of AGPLv3, the copyright holder is expressly entitled to impose additional conditions. In the case of ONLYOFFICE, such conditions include, in particular:
>the obligation to retain the original product logo (Section 7(b));
>the denial of any rights to use the copyright holder’s trademarks (Section 7(e)).
In other words you must use our logo and you must not use our logo. Good luck enforcing that.
Yes, but they can't do anything about it anyway. The FSF resolution on this matter, though, essentially means that they might just as well pull Euro-Office patches into OnlyOffice. So in the end, the product will be formed by combined effort.
The codebase will diverge quickly; the Russian one is heavily obfuscated with s ton of Russian in it and obscure commit messages. A large portion of prep work by Nextcloud was cleaning and translating. OnlyOffice was also known for refusing PRs, too.
War is between governments. A bad actor might as well lie that they're not Russian. If anything this is a good thing. Lets not make war define who we work with
Hard disagree. The war has been at least tacitly supported by the majority of the Russian public (via enlistment, taxation or just acquiescence) and it's very explicitly being waged against the Ukrainian public (via killing, occupation, expropriation etc).
"Define who we work with" is basically the point of sanctions. Unless you think they're too robust too, and we should limit ourselves to strongly worded postcards?
Wait how does it establish collaboration? Because its opensource so anyone can copy the source code? If so, thats a pretty weak, and disengenuous argument. Is the US collaborating with russia because russians can use the internet and darpa funded its initial RnD?
Euro-Office codebase will, obviously, not diverge significantly from the original product. If they planned fundamental changes, they would have started from scratch because taking over a huge project and rewriting its basis is an ever more daunting undertaking.
As such, any future patches to both codebases should be trivial to copy from one another, which essentially makes it collaboration.
The developer is "Ascensio System SIA", and they are located in Riga, Latvia.
Why the mention of Russian developers?
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Oh, god