Euro-Office: First version of the open-source web office is here

ddoener about 4 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on heise.de

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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67% Positive

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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

deelayman•about 1 hour ago

Immediate quality of life improvement: Euro-Office disabled Only-Office's paid license gate on mobile web browser editing. I can finally send collaboration links to family and friends without them needing to download the only-office phone app to edit the document.

soared•about 3 hours ago

https://github.com/Euro-Office

I’m not familiar with the project, but can anyone clarify what it means that it’s not intended to be used standalone and instead built into other projects? What’s the intention / expectation?

_the_inflator•about 1 hour ago

The project's FAQ are kinda enlightening: https://github.com/Euro-Office#faq

Your question is somewhat answered there: "What is Euro-Office?", "How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki?"

However especially "Why was a new office suite needed" is telling.

True EU sovereignty spells: the only requirement is, it must work "greatly" with MS. Oh well, in the past libreoffice and the likes mostly chose open formats as their reason.

If EU sovereignty means simply being a rip off, you get into trouble my friends. This is Chinas business and doesn't spell innovation nor does it mean optimism for the future.

simjnd•about 3 hours ago

> but developed to be [...] integrated in another product that handles documents, for example a file sharing solution, an online wiki, a project management tool and so on

It looks like it only provides the document editing part and you need an app around it to actually open the document from a filesystem and provide its content to this editing interface, and take the output and save it back to the filesystem? (Filesystem, or whatever persistent storage medium)

pdpi•about 2 hours ago

VS Code is built on top of the general-purpose Monaco editor component that's used by a bunch of other projects. This thing is basically meant to be the Monaco of rich-text.

traverseda•about 3 hours ago

It's a WOPI app. Designed for embedding microsoft 365 office app in other web apps, but other people implement it. There's callabria, and this.

You'd use it to connect nextcloud to one of these providers. Probably some other enterprise apps I don't know about can use it to edit documents.

carlosjobim•about 1 hour ago

When they don't even bother to make a proper example screenshot for their headline image, it's hard to think of it as quality software.

My impression is that FOSS people don't use Office software very much. So are they fit to develop Office software? You need to use something extensively yourself, or do careful and proper back-and-forth with real users if you want to make a quality product.

ChrisArchitect•about 3 hours ago

Related from the Document Foundation:

An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/06/08/an-open-...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451427)

ForHackernews•about 3 hours ago

It can't possibly be a worse user experience than Microsoft CoPilot Teams Office 365 Copilot with AI Co-Pilot so I say bring on the eurocrats.

ChrisArchitect•about 3 hours ago

Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490715

robthebrew•about 4 hours ago

Ironically this website will not allow access unless you agree to data harvesting or pay up.

dgellow•about 2 hours ago

What do you mean? I didn’t get a modal or banner

em-bee•about 1 hour ago

you must have already agreed and forgotten about it.

clear all your cookies from heise and see what happens.

kps•about 3 hours ago

Chrome's Reading mode avoids this.

em-bee•30 minutes ago

likewise on firefox

JohnTHaller•about 3 hours ago

You can zap the element in Firefox with uBlock Origin

retired•about 3 hours ago

Feels illegal under EU GDPR rules. I believe the accept and reject buttons should be equal size and style. Pay to eject, I’m not sure if that is illegal.

em-bee•27 minutes ago

it is illegal. see the other comments below.

what's most grating is that heise as a technical publication that is much more familiar with these issues should really know about this.

dgellow•about 2 hours ago

The pay to eject is illegal under gdpr

https://noyb.eu/en/court-decides-pay-or-okay-derstandardat-i...

NOYB doing all the good work once more

em-bee•37 minutes ago

oh finally, we were just talking about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444803

here is another one (from the above link)

https://noyb.eu/en/nordic-media-giant-schibsted-switches-pay...

arcadialeak•about 3 hours ago

I can't help but notice that this, in effect, establishes collaboration between EU and Russian devs over a common open-source office suite, because both projects can easily copy future changes from each other. The irony is staggering, given the war and the public rhetoric.

sheept•about 3 hours ago

It doesn't seem like a pleasant, bilateral collaboration since Russian developers do not seem pleased about the Euro-Office initiative.[0]

[0]: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE#%EF%B8%8F-legal-note

arcadialeak•about 2 hours ago

Yes, but they can't do anything about it anyway. The FSF resolution on this matter, though, essentially means that they might just as well pull Euro-Office patches into OnlyOffice. So in the end, the product will be formed by combined effort.

samrus•about 3 hours ago

Wait how does it establish collaboration? Because its opensource so anyone can copy the source code? If so, thats a pretty weak, and disengenuous argument. Is the US collaborating with russia because russians can use the internet and darpa funded its initial RnD?

arcadialeak•about 2 hours ago

Euro-Office codebase will, obviously, not diverge significantly from the original product. If they planned fundamental changes, they would have started from scratch because taking over a huge project and rewriting its basis is an ever more daunting undertaking.

As such, any future patches to both codebases should be trivial to copy from one another, which essentially makes it collaboration.

ramon156•about 3 hours ago

War is between governments. A bad actor might as well lie that they're not Russian. If anything this is a good thing. Lets not make war define who we work with

mrec•about 3 hours ago

Hard disagree. The war has been at least tacitly supported by the majority of the Russian public (via enlistment, taxation or just acquiescence) and it's very explicitly being waged against the Ukrainian public (via killing, occupation, expropriation etc).

"Define who we work with" is basically the point of sanctions. Unless you think they're too robust too, and we should limit ourselves to strongly worded postcards?

neonstatic•about 2 hours ago

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Oh, god