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Microsoft alternative: Nextcloud and Ionos develop open-source ‘Euro-Office’ (www.heise.de)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Nextcloud, Ionos and other partners are developing an open-source office suite under the project name „Euro-Office“ as an alternative to the market-dominant Microsoft Office.

The two partners are not starting from scratch, but have forked the components of OnlyOffice available as open-source code and want to build on them. In the summer, the software is then intended to replace the previous office component Collabora in Nextcloud and the Ionos Nextcloud Workspace. A ‘technical preview’ is already available on GitHub.

While this is a good news, I think they should move from github, you know microslop copilot..

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[–] 30 points 7 months ago (7 children)

Honestly this stinks of potential enshitification downstream. Libreoffice and Openoffice are just fine. Nextcloud's posture in the market and "Brand name feel" sets of my alarm that it is like 5 minutes away from charging people subscriptions for self-hosting if they don't already. Synology runner up?

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  • [–] 32 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    Nextcloud's business model is service contracts. Which is going great. The origin story of Nextcloud is that ownCloud was too commercial (open core) instead of fully open source, so they forked it. I haven't seen any moves by Nextcloud that has moved their focus from open source to hint at enshitification. Your claims are rather bold and without proof. Nextcloud doesn't even use LibreOffice, but the online derivative Collabora. Also OpenOffice has been dead for more than a decade so I don't know why you even reference that. Are you confusing this with the totally different OnlyOffice ('only' not 'open') which this news is actually about?

    Their fork of OnlyOffice is actually because it is open core and they want it fully open source: https://github.com/Euro-Office/#euro-office-liberates-the-onlyoffice-code-base

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I haven’t made any claims. My comment is about the “vibes” of NextCloud as a “product” and “company”, if you want objectivity in what i’m saying.

    Im not a nextcloud user and it’s good that you personally don’t feel that they’ve made any moves towards enshitification but we’ve seen countless companies start with great and pure intentions that unfortunately throw that all out the window when: an opportunity to be a market leader, opportunity of profits becomes too great, or the userbase becomes significant enough. “Open Source” seems to unfortunately be part of the tech company corporate playbook.

    We live in a world where organizations and companies get to change terms after sale now. While it is not zero sum, if you’re not exercising skepticism towards those trying to offer you something, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice. Nothing is truly free.

    Also, OpenOffice is definitely not dead lol https://www.openoffice.org/

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    Nextcloud uses GNU AGPLv3 and explicitly doesn't use a CLA: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/blob/master/contribute/HowToApplyALicense.md. They do this to prevent themselves from relicensing it. So they can't suddenly take the code and make it closed source.

    Regarding OpenOffice. I used to be a big fan of OpenOffice more than a decade ago, but LibreOffice has become my open source office suite since then.

    Apache OpenOffice (AOO) might still work, but there is no significant development (see commits of the last year https://github.com/apache/openoffice/graphs/contributors?from=2025-05-01&to=2026-04-02&type=c). Only one person is committing on a daily/weekly basis, but this person is in their own words not a developer (https://github.com/apache/openoffice/pull/202#issuecomment-2561915795). Most of the commits are 'cleanup' commits where whitespace or comments are changed https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commits/trunk/.

    LibreOffice on the other hand is actively developed. Others who are actually involved explained this better than I can:

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