Reading from Wikipedia: Euro-Office is an upcoming open-source office suite and collaborative software platform based on OnlyOffice that provides editors for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. The software includes web-based, desktop, and mobile applications designed for document creation, editing, and collaborative work

Why can't they just sponsor libreoffice rather than start their own?

Because then commercial companies couldn't earn a fortune in the process, of course! /s

That was my first thought too. Apparently Euro-office is based on OnlyOffice. According to Nextcloud and IONOS "Libre Office is 35 years old and no longer the most innovative and fluid". For more detail: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Microsoft-alternative-Nextcloud-and-Ionos-develop-open-source-Euro-Office-11228123.html. I would like to hear what The Document Foundation thinks about this.

This interview (Dutch) with the investor should, in my opinion, scare people away from it. It's just a bunch of none-answers and uncertainty

Q: Is that your plan with Office EU too? To sell it after a few years?

A: Tja, I am not sure about that. I can't see that far into the future, I don't know.

Q: So which apps don’t use Nextcloud?

A: Once we’re live, I’ll show you.

Q: Have you written any code around it yourselves?

A: A great deal has been written around it. (This is literally the whole answer to that question)

Q: Could you give an example of that? Will that be open source too?

Q: Well, look, you know what it is? I don’t really feel comfortable talking about this. You approached me. I’m saying: I’m not actually ready for this yet, because we’re sorting out a few things.

Well 35 years is just false, even if you count it as a continuation from StarOffice that would be 41 years, I can't work out where they got 35 from, but that's a stupid argument anyway, it's only as old as its last version, OnlyOffice lacks features. I'm not impressed by any of this.

this looks a lot like that "European X alternative" named "W" which was vaporware. I wish journalist were more critical with the claims of these people.

Sadly, this is probably why.

LibreOffice:

Answering my own question, here is a link to a blog post from The Document Foundation, https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/27/odf-is-the-future-ooxml-is-the-past/. The criticism of The Document Foundation centers around the use of Microsoft OOXML format in OnlyOffice instead of the truly open ODF standard in LibreOffice.

It's just straight up Nextcloud with a bunch of app integration

And saying a free version will not come despite the FAQ saying it is..

Ah, so it's basically just OnlyOffice (and a few other apps?) in a wrapper, provided as a hosted solution.

I see that Euro-Office claims to support ODF and that doesn't seem like a direct response to them. My criticism still stands though.

... ok, obvious problems that need to be addressed (and why not make it a nonprofit?), but I'm honestly impressed Microslop doesn't own all the domain extensions for the office domain.

Euro-Office and Office EU (office.eu) are not the same project.

How does Euro-Office compare to IONOS Workspace, office.eu, the Proton productivity suite, Nextcloud Hub or XWiki: Euro-Office is more of an integration component. It merely handles document editing itself. Storage, as well as navigation, permissions and sharing logic has to be offered by a platform it is integrated in, like Proton Docs, Nextcloud Hub or OpenProject.
– https://github.com/Euro-Office/.github/blob/main/profile/README.md#faq

Maybe it's because of GNU licenses or something.

Thanks for clearing that up. The similarity of the names is very confusing and had me completely fooled.