An open letter from the Document Foundation warns that Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe, isn’t what it seems - and may reinforce Microsoft’s closed source technology instead.
… Microsoft … developed and controls the horrible proprietary OOXML format, designed precisely to prevent Digital Sovereignty by maintaining content lock-in. It is far less understandable on the part of companies that claim to advocate open source, such as those promoting Euro-Office.
Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe.
So, despite what is being written in support of Euro-Office — the latest of the office suites developed in Europe, and not the first — the announcement is not against Microsoft. On the contrary, it strengthens 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 could always pull a reverse-enshittification by offering full compatibility for the OOXML format and defaulting to it initially, then once the software has a loyal userbase, publish tools making it simple to convert existing documents to open formats as well as arguing for doing so. It would be a fight with Microsoft but they have to start somewhere realistic, and the world still uses Microsoft.
You really believe in the good of man eh?
I really dislike those opportunistic bootlicker like euro office and euro os.
I’m not familiar with EuroOS. What is it?
I meant EU OS. A “proof of concept” Linux distribution but instead on relying on already existing European based Linux Distributions (arch, opensuse, cachyos) it’s using fedora which is backed by Red Hat.
But hey it looks fancy with the European flag replaced the stars of the founding nations with windows cursors.
