Open source Euro-Office productivity suite to launch June 9

The Euro-Office open source productivity app suite will be available with the first stable release of the software on June 9. 

Euro-Office was unveiled in March with the aim of providing a modern, open source alternative to Microsoft and Google software for European organizations increasingly wary of a dependence on US-based suppliers. 

Euro-Office consists of four browser-based applications: a document editor, spreadsheet program, presentation tool, and a PDF editor, with each application enabling collaborative document editing. It supports Microsoft Office file formats DOCX, PPTX and XLSX, as well as Open Document Format (ODF) files such as ODS, ODT and ODP.

The software is intended to be integrated into collaboration solutions such as file-sharing platforms, online wikis or project management tools, according to Nextcloud, one of several European organizations involved in the Euro-Office project.

Nextcloud will add Euro-Office to its Nextcloud Office next month, where it will be available as an “equal option” alongside an existing open-source productivity suite based on Collabora’s software, Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek said in a briefing. Pricing will depend on factors such as use case and deployment scale, but will sit in a similar range to the Collabora version.

Nextcloud plans to add desktop and mobile apps “later this summer,” said Karlitschek; these will save documents locally and sync to cloud storage tools that customers choose.

German cloud hosting provider Ionos will also integrate Euro-Office into its Nextcloud Workspace subscription at no extra cost, and as an optional paid add-on to its HiDrive and Managed Nextcloud subscriptions. (Pricing information was not immediately available.)

Nextcloud and Ionos are currently hiring a “dedicated development team” to work on Euro-Office, Nextcloud said in a blog post Thursday. Other software vendors, including Xwiki and Office.eu, are expected to incorporate Euro-Office into their products in the coming months, too.

Euro-Office is built on the open-source code base of OnlyOffice and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL v3). 

Following the launch announcement, OnlyOffice — which is owned by Ascensio System SIA — alleged in March that Euro-Office violated its licensing terms and infringed its copyright, due to a lack of attribution to OnlyOffice.

Karlitschek said this week that the conflict with OnlyOffice is “now resolved,” following an agreement to provide attribution to OnlyOffice in Euro-Office. “We came to an agreement that the OnlyOffice people required only attribution, that you basically mention that the code is partly based on top of OnlyOffice, and we are happy to do it.”

But an OnlyOffice spokesperson denied a specific agreement had yet been reached. “OnlyOffice has not entered into any agreement with the Euro-Office project,” said Galina Goduhina, commercial director at OnlyOffice. 

“Our licensing framework is clearly defined, and compliance with its terms is not optional,” Goduhina said. “We will continue to assess the situation based on actual use of our technology.

 “This situation goes beyond attribution— it concerns transparency of technology origin, respect for the original developer — and does not meet the standards of responsible partnership we expect,” Goduhina said. “OnlyOffice remains focused on supporting its users, customers and partners and continuing to develop reliable, enterprise-grade document solutions.”OnlyOffice recently published a blog post outlining its license and trademark policy in more detail. 

A Nextcloud spokesperson said the blog post indicated a change in the OnlyOffice license to “bring it in line” with AGPLv3. 

“We applaud the removal of the conflicting requirements around the trademark, aligning with our opinion and that of the licensing experts in the open source community,” the spokesperson said. “We will adopt their changes as they are being made to the code, of course ensuring the license compliance is preserved. With these changes we consider the matter resolved.”Open source Euro-Office productivity suite to launch June 9 – ComputerworldRead More