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Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty. It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile. If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept
Tdf is right when it comes to Europe needing to switch away from ooxml, but their attacks against Euro-Office are out of place imho. Yes, in a perfect world, we all switch to LibreOffice and start using odf today, but in the real world, already showing users* that there are alternatives to Microslops office suite will be a huge challenge, and Euro-Office can be an ally here. This infighting however only benefits Microslop.
*Here: people outside of the fediverse, who habe no idea/interest in the topic of foss vs corporate driven enshittification
It should be an easy change for EuroOffice to make files save as .odt instead of .docx by default.
Yes, and as soon as the move away from MS office gains momentum, this should be the default. But I’m not convinced that this is how you push forward wider adoption. User adoption (and pushback) can make or break a migration towards better systems, no matter how smart the move is from a rational pov
100%. Microsoft’s whole thing is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but they’re not immune to it happening to them too. EuroOffice can embrace docx for now but extinguish it later on
Afaik that was mentioned as the plan in the Euro-office announcement post, but OnlyOffice has been designed for maximum compatibility with the Microsoft formats and .odf support is only an afterthough.