What’s of interest? Office EU - Europe’s Open-Source Productivity Suite
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Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite (like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) that is 100% European-owned and runs entirely on European infrastructure.
Office EU is designed for organisations and individuals across Europe who refuse to trade convenience for privacy. Whether you’re a small business owner, part of a non-profit team, or a privacy-conscious individual, Office EU adapts to you.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
That is interesting. Obviously, while this appears to handle quantity, the the next question is a question of quality. And after that open? And then commercial or not-for-profit. I would love to hear from anyone who has used this.
As an alternative for the office suite component, we have been working with Collabora (https://www.collaboraonline.com/) who has been porting opensource LibreOffice to the cloud and getting sizable EU funds to make an viable alterntive to Google/Microsoft. And doing so with OpenSource technology that can run on EU or any other geolocated host.
This is the basis of the Forge platform in the LibreVerse that we built to faciliate long-form writing and Open Pedagogy at scale (https://forge.libretexts.org).
For what it’s worth, Delmar, the Office.eu site is displaying a system which is a combination of NextCloud and Collabora Office (both German open source/libre projects backed by companies – NextCloud was formerly known as OwnCloud), which together provide an excellent (I would say ‘drop-in’) replacement for Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps, including the messaging/audio/video conferencing functionality of MS Teams/Google Meet.
NextCloud also offers far more besides with its open source/libre ‘app’ ecosystem which offers substantially more integrations and further features. Note that Collabora (a German company) has been working on providing a browser-based collaborative ‘front-end’ for LibreOffice (which is a more mature version of stand alone Microsoft office whose codebase actually started before MS Office - it was originally started as StarOffice by German company, StarDivision, which was later acquired by Sun Microsystems because it was cheaper to buy the company than pay for MS Office for all their staff, and who then open sourced it as OpenOffice. Then when Oracle acquired Sun, it was forked by its libre dev community to create LibreOffice (while Oracle’s jealous control of OpenOffice saw it whither and effectively die) which is now an excellent desktop alternative to Microsoft Office, offering better support, in many cases, for Microsoft files than even Microsoft’s own Office (even ‘corrupt’ files that MS Office won’t open).
At the OER Foundation, we ran NextCloud + CollaboraOffice (we actually preferred an excellent competing libre productivity system OnlyOffice - we had the option of switching between them) for nearly a decade and were amazed how much user-focused quality and capability libre projects like these can achieve on a negligible fraction of the resources of mega corporate products like those from Microsoft and Google. And without all the bloat, surveillance, content slurping for LLM training, and mostly unwanted AI integration.
I think the EU’s entering a very interesting phase as US BigTech is increasingly smothering its golden geese with pervasive ensh*ttification.
Thank you for the clarification of the history of things. I had heard a bit about NextCloud in the Collabora discussions, but never followed the breadcrumbs to look it up. I now know a little bit more.
OnlyOffice is a false open source software (developed in Russia by the subsidiary of a military supplier), as the AGPL license has been modified and is not compatible with the Open Source Definition.
In addition, OnlyOffice defaults to the closed proprietary Microsoft document format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) which today is the main lock in mechanism used by Microsoft. Open Education Resources, in order to be truly open, should use the Open Document Format (ODF) used as default document format by LibreOffice and Is true open derivatives.
Using the Microsoft document format means putting your contents in the hand of a company which can block the access to documents at any time by silently changing the proprietary format. This is what has happened to the ICC (International Criminal Court) when Microsoft has blocked all contents because the US president didn’t like the sentence against Israel’s prime minister.
Unfortunately, the difference between the two formats is not visible to users, and this is the reason why Microsoft was able to convince the majority of users that their document format - which has been approved by ISO but has never been implemented according to the description provided to ISO - is a good choice as a standard format.
I can provide the necessary evidence about the above. I have written several articles on the topic on LibreOffice project blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org, but there are hundreds of articles by academics which I can provide.
Thanks all for jumping in, I shared this purely on impulse of interest after seeing @lightweight share it in Mastodon.
The web site for Office..eu states it is/will be open source though I saw no specifics and also there is going to be fees for it, with some mention of a free version (is that free as in free or free as in just a taste before one has to pay?).
Thanks for the insight @italovignoli on the file formats and the link to the Document Foundation blog.
You are correct @DelmarLarsen that it calls for more than all the functionality of an Office like suite but also to maintain the storage and interoperability. That has to come with some costs, right?
I am a huge fan of LibreOffice the only such software on my machine (I have not installed a MS product since 3 laptops ago in 2012) as it allows me to open and use any Office type document that is shared (I do little creation with it). I try to make shared documents we send out on .odf format. And as someone who h s a lot of old arcane files, LibreOffice has excelled at being able to open my old PICT images and such. A cloud version is most interesting. May the Forge be with us
I am not very expert in all these platforms (I am counting on Dave), but have come across CryptPad and I am sure many more.
For what it’s worth, @italovignoli, I was quite involved in the process of making OOXML an open standard, very strongly opposed to it being ratified by various national standards bodies like here in Aotearoa NZ. Microsoft stacked the standards committees all around the world just to ram that one standard through (it was politically expedient for them at the time as some countries/US states were waking up - very late – that they were totally locked into MS’ proprietary formats). In a just/smart world, we’d all be using ODF today, but we’re not. For the record, we in Aotearoa NZ voted against OOXML.
I’m a huge proponent of the rather elegant Open Document Format open standard, too (which, ironically, Microsoft helped to develop before deciding to muddy the waters - sort of like having the Metric system established and then saying “let’s add the byzantine US standard/Imperial measurement system, too, so that users have ‘choice’.” Ugh. So dumb).
The truth, though, as you say, is that most users have no understanding of file formats and don’t care. Sadly, MS’ OOXML files continue to dominate, although (again ironically), LibreOffice supports them more robustly than Microsoft’s apps do. LibreOffice actually beat Microsoft to supporting Microsoft’s own OOXML ‘open’ standard by more than a year. And I use quotes on ‘open’ because Microsoft unilaterally controls the specification, meaning they can change it at their whim, undermining any third parties trying to implement it. So yes, we need to replace Microsoft as they’re a very bad actor.
As for OnlyOffice, yes, its a Russian project, but it is distributed under the AGPL (license), and it is quite good software (currently even better to use than Collabora Office in our experience). But the beauty for normal users not fussed about file format issues is that, with NextCloud, you can integrate either or both and use whichever you prefer on the day. They’re largely interchangeable (except OO doesn’t work as well with ODF files).
OnlyOffice’s AGPL is a modified version which is not compatible with the Open Source Definition, and as such is a proprietary license: you cannot change the name of the software and you have to maintain the OnlyOffice logo. In addition, they default to OOXML and their support of ODF is intentionally poor (because the description is clear enough to make the support easy, and poor support is intentional to disqualify open standards, in line with Microsoft strategy). In fact, OnlyOffice is a Microsoft ally against LibreOffice and Collabora Office.
I don’t dispute your accusation of OnlyOffice. Sadly, many companies abuse libre licenses like the GPL and AGPL - just about all commercial companies in the WordPress ecosystem do, for example (where they require you to ‘buy a premium license’ for plugins and themes which must be GPL licensed due to that being WP’s license). We need to fund people like the Software Freedom Law Center to enforce libre software licenses proactively. You may well be right that OO are helping Microsoft more than libre software efforts. Their software is, however, quite good, and better to use than Collabora, at least for the moment, in my experience. And there are folks who’re exercising their rights under the AGP license, e.g. CryptPad. Also this project I’m currently using.
