They are right about what they wrote. Additionally, Euro-Office is developed on Microslop's GitHub. I don't know where libreoffice is developed.
what? they didn't blast them?
I use Emacs plus LaTeX to author stuff.
If I gotta read Office documents, then LibreOffice.
Awesome!
We gotta speak up!
I really don't get this latest series if tantrums from LibreOffice/The Document Foundation. They are attacking every other up-and-coming open source document project.
Are you mad about people choosing a different project that's easier to switch from M$? Stay mad I guess, or make your project better. LibreOffice hasn't had a major UI update in a decade, and it was a decade overdue at the time. The menus are a crowded mess with poorly thought-out hierarchy. Mobile and collaborative editors are a joke. No one cares if LibreOffice technically has the best backend, with the most accurate rendering and niche features, if it is harder for the average mainstream user to learn and use.
You can burn your energy bemoaning the loss of users... or you can be better and win them back. Rarely both.
Last thing, a few facts about the "dreaded" OOXML format they are railing against.
ITT:
Government funds don't spend themselves.
This is horseshit.
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 the flag of open-source office suites flying when everyone was predicting their demise, and who continued to develop the only truly open and standard format that guarantees Digital Sovereignty, as it provides full user control over content.
The answer to this, is "thank you for your service". It is / was genuinely valuable. That being said, arguments about what people said or agreed with in the past is irrelevant to discussions about how to move forward.
The basic premise of this kind of arguing is a smell that you don't actually have a real argument to lean on. It's like credential dropping, it's a heuristic that hints at what could be a likelier truth than another, based purely on debate metadata, but that's it, and by their nature / definition, heuristics are constantly wrong.
Insisting on a white knight campaign to make a file format standard when you are not the standard file saving platform is Quixotic. It does not make you an ally of Microsoft to meet users where they're at.
The EU government mandating a certain file format might actually move the needle, a niche documenting software's defaults will not. This is why Microsoft's famous playbook was "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", not "try and force a niche number of users into making this a thing somehow" (of course, Microsoft has also tried and failed the latter playbook numerous times).
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out MS is behind Euro-Office.
Euro-Office could always pull a reverse-enshittification by offering full compatibility for the OOXML format and defaulting to it initially, then once the software has a loyal userbase, publish tools making it simple to convert existing documents to open formats as well as arguing for doing so. It would be a fight with Microsoft but they have to start somewhere realistic, and the world still uses Microsoft.
Microsoft - The Genocide Computing Company!
Boom.
Genuine question, if somebody could help me out, I'd appreciate it. How does using OOXML restrict what a user can do with their own content? Or have have I missed the point here?
Not a great decision, but a practical one. As long as it has great support for both, the default can be changed later once it has traction.
That's a whole lot of opinions just to say 'hey, you forgot these office suites were EU and existed for quite a while so we think the terminology you're using is confusing, and we don't agree about using that format as a default'. Seems pretty straight forward and I think I agree. Implementing a popup explaining and then presenting the choice for formats might be a cool middle ground.
But EU-Office is not trying to do a hostile takeover of LibreOffice as far as I know, and having a well maintained fork could lead to mutual benefits. I don't really get the hostility, if it's FOSS, it's FOSS.
Back in the land of reality governments have decades of office documents Ina proprietary format that need to be delt with so any office suite at least in the beginning need to access to them as written.
My first thought after reading about Euro Office was "they act as if this were the first European office suite, but if that were the case, what the hell have I been using since the 1990s?".
Why is "digital sovereignty" the current buzzword? That word can clearly mean both good things and bad things. It's a good thing when it means giving people and organizations control over their own computing (instead of some cloud provider or proprietary software company).
But there's no inherent value in insisting on "European software"; proprietary software doesn't become any better because it was developed in Europe, nor is free software bad because it wasn't developed in Europe.
The term can even mean things I would consider bad, such as: extending the application of laws to foreign entities on the Internet, which usually leads to censorship. I certainly don't want digital sovereignty like the People's Republic of China does it!
Also PSA because I was confused: euro office is a fork of only office, of potentially Russian origin, whilst libre office is a fork of open office, of likely non Russian origin.
For those who care.
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