The topic LibreOffice accuses Euro-Office’s methods as being just as bad as… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Since the start of April, there has been a ton of discourse around the new open-source productivity suite on the block, Euro-Office. Right from the get-go, OnlyOffice accused Euro-Office of using its code without its proper licensing. Euro-Office responded, claiming that “open collaboration with OnlyOffice was not possible.” Now, with Euro-Office making headlines with its release, LibreOffice has piped up, claiming that the team behind the new software is deceiving its users.
In a statement on the LibreOffice website, Italo Vignoli, one of the founding members of The Document Foundation, took to the stage in an open letter to Euro-Office. Right off the bat, Vignoli tackles Euro-Office’s claims that it’s “the first open-source office suite developed in Europe.” Vignoli cites OpenOffice’s 2001 release and LibreOffice’s 2010 release as examples in his argument.
However, Vignoli’s main issue is how Euro-Office handles its document formats. The Document Foundation struggles with Microsoft’s OOXML format, which it says was designed specifically to make it as difficult as possible for other office suites to read. The Document Foundation’s efforts to achieve Digital Sovereignty with its open file formats helped fight against that. Now, Vignoli accuses Euro-Office of following in the same footsteps as Microsoft:
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.
Vignoli rounds off his statement by saying that, while Euro-Office claims to be an open-source alternative to proprietary software, its OOXML document format strategy is actually more pro-Microsoft, if anything. By helping popular OOXML files, Vignoli feels that the move “strengthens Microsoft’s strategy against European Digital Sovereignty.”
Euro-Office is hard to get running, but LibreOffice already solved this problem.