In a bold move to assert digital sovereignty, European tech firms have announced the imminent release of Euro-Office, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs. The suite, set to launch on June 9, promises to liberate European governments and businesses from the shackles of American software-as-a-service.
“We’ve had enough of Clippy and his invasive suggestions,” declared Achim Weiss, CEO of Ionos, in a press conference held in a vault filled with GDPR-compliant servers. “Euro-Office offers a familiar interface, but with a distinctly European flair — think more bureaucracy, less pop-ups.”
The suite is a collaborative effort from a consortium of European cloud vendors, including Nextcloud and XWiki, who argue that digital sovereignty is more than just a buzzword.
Euro-Office is not a fork of LibreOffice, as some might assume, but rather a repackaging of OnlyOffice’s open-source core. This has led to a minor legal tussle, which developers dismiss as “just another day in the open-source world.”
With features like real-time collaboration and support for Microsoft formats, Euro-Office aims to provide a seamless transition for users who are tired of paying subscription fees for software that updates itself at the worst possible moment.
“We’re not starting from scratch,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud. “We’re simply taking existing European code and putting a blue and yellow flag on it. That’s all it takes to claim sovereignty these days.”
The suite will initially be available through products like Nextcloud Hub, and plans are in place to integrate it into other platforms.
In related news, developers have promised that Euro-Office will come with a built-in feature to automatically translate all documents into Esperanto, just to be extra sovereign.