Euro-Office — Your sovereign office

What is Euro-Office?

Euro-Office bills itself as an open, transparent, sovereign solution for collaborative document editing — think spreadsheets, documents, presentations and even PDFs — designed to be embedded into other web products rather than run as a standalone app. It supports DOCX, PPTX, XLSX and ODF formats like ODT/ODS/ODP, and promises real‑time co‑editing plus mobile and desktop clients in progress. The aim is simple: give organizations a self‑hostable, community‑driven alternative to proprietary or opaque office stacks. Who gets to hold your documents matters. Seriously.

Why the fork?

Euro-Office is built on the ONLYOFFICE open‑source (AGPL) codebase, but the project says it “liberates” that code and has forked it to make contribution and review easier. It has been reported that attempts to collaborate upstream were blocked by a lack of pull‑request reviews, unreliable build instructions and the presence of binary or obfuscated blobs. It has also been reported that ONLYOFFICE made controversial product decisions — allegedly closing features in mobile apps and removing admin controls — and that the company’s sizable Russian developer base and limited transparency have heightened trust concerns for some users and customers. Those are serious accusations; Euro‑Office frames the fork as a remedy: cleaner repo, clearer governance, and fewer barriers to contribution.

Governance and community

The project is being developed in public and invites contributions from individuals, companies and public organizations. Current contributors and supporters listed include IONOS, Nextcloud, EuroStack, XWiki, OpenProject, Proton, Soverin, Abilian and BTactic — plus an open invitation: “You?” Governance is being set up with a steering committee in mind, but meanwhile the project says it will follow a “who codes, decides” model and add regular contributors to the GitHub project by consensus. There’s also a Code of Conduct and a call to arms: file issues, send PRs, help run the DocumentServer.

Digital sovereignty has been a hot topic in Europe for years; this is another play in that field. Whether Euro‑Office will become the trusted, transparent alternative its backers promise depends on execution — and on whether the wider community chooses to show up and help shape it. Want in? The repo is public; the conversation has just begun.

Sources: github.com/euro-office, Hacker News