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.

It's almost as if a suite's capability to open a format is not tied to its default format.

According to the article, Euro-Office defaults to Microsoft's format, instead of .ods, so the whole "sovereignty" argument sure seems to be getting kicked down there road for later, while being used for maximum marketing.

It's just standard corner-cutting hypocrisy.

Again they have decades of documents that need to be dealt with so of course its going to default to MS format, I figured people would get that. I use Softmaker office for the exact same reason because in the real world I need to deal with the format.

Libreoffice accepts both. Why Eurooffice can't is a wonder truly worth of research

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!

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.

they have decades of documents that need to be dealt with so of course its going to default to MS format,

You are not making sense. What formats can be opened and read has nothing to do with what format the software defaults to (when writing).

It does because governments have to interact with people, companies, and governments that use MS Office. They can probably get along internally with whatever format they choose but that doesn't apply to their customers.

Seems like a good way to spread adoption of ods then!

Except it won't people will just playing the handoff game with pdf's further solo ing things down.

Euro office is doing things the right way

Euro-Office is based on OnlyOffice, and therefore not a LibreOffice fork.

There are also decades document management systems, databases and other 3rd party tools that only speak ooxml. Defaulting to odf guarantees that documents will be incompatible, which will cause unnecessary friction.

All it takes is one high up civil servant to hit this issue, say "The MS tools never did this", and the entire transition will be in jeopardy. The people using these tools want to create documents that are compatible, that is ALL they care about.

HDDVD and betamax lost the format war. So did ODF. Its time to move on.

It would be a great way to piss people off.

Why is “digital sovereignty” the current buzzword?

You surely have noticed that the US government and most big US companies have been stealing our data for years?

European software is a "branding" around free software that is trying to say away from Trump, Microsoft, and all the other idiots. It took 20 years for the governments to do something about it, and I agree they have been too slow, but at least they are doing something.

European software is a “branding” around free software

except, it's not, they are entirely separate concepts; if people want to promote free software, they should say that

You forgot: around free software that is trying to say away from Trump, Microsoft, and all the other idiots

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?".