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?
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Nextcloud is free software (aGPL v3) though so your worries are very misleading.
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
LibreOffice doesn’t run on mobile.
They need to come up with a less cringe name than EuroOffice if they want any adoption. Not going to replace nationalism with pan-European nationalism.
If the point of this fork is software for European government use, I think the name is right on the nose.
I doubt EuroOffice needs widespread adoption, honestly. If I understand it right, the project isn't creating new document formats. They're just creating new software to read and edit existing formats. Like with email, where there are a thousand different email apps and providers, but they're all compatible, they can all send mail to one another, because they all use the same email protocol.
And if you don't like how one email app is managed you can move to another. Just like the EU doesn't like how Microsoft and Google will delete their politicians' accounts on Donald Trump's orders, so they're moving to another.
And governments outside the EU can and should build their own open source software and apps so they can control their own software independently of the big multinational (which we now know means American) tech firms.
I mean to say, I wouldn't want China or India or Indonesia or Brazil to use EuroOffice. I'd want them to build their own document apps, so that their governments' work can be controlled by their governments and not by potentially hostile foreign political or corporate powers.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, right?
Why don’t they contribute to LibreOffice Online?
Because it's RDP based (unless something has changed). OnlyOffice is HTTP based, so it slots in perfectly for online portals.
Because the Only Office source is more modern while Libre Offices's source code now is around 35 years old. At least that was the reasoning in one of the articles I read.
So old code is now suddenly bad? Weird and somewhat also not the case, as LibreOffice is constantly updated.
I guess it is a preference. I for myself tend to rather use a FreeBSD than Fedora for production environments.
Guess we should all stop using cell phones too, the erlang that powers them is old as dirt and therefore must be bad.
So old code is now suddenly bad?
Yes. It must go stale without some kind of needless churn; right?
I loved solving a problem that redhat cant fix (because the smart people left) on their theForeman clone with a workaround that I learned from the days of NIS+. A 30-year-old workaround for last year's shitty install.
But fear of established, known-good code will certainly change that in the long run: ifconfig, netstat, ifup, fstab, xinet, service; the more we can churn out the working tools for neu dreck coded by dunning-kruger lost-boys kids who had no mentoring to prevent dumb patterns, the less the working solutions for known-good tools will work. And that's, some how, "progress".
Sometimes it is better to start fresh.
Especially when you want to be the owner of something.
Libre has 35 years of good, bad, and the ugly. It's has 35 years of tech debt, and design choices made. That's not easy to just "fix"
It's a completely different beast to sift through legacy code than it is to just start fresh requiring a completely separate set of skills.
Not getting rid of the old is one of the many reason Windows is such a shit show. Every program today in 2026 asks itself "Am I Barbie Riding Club(1996)? Before it runs because it needs a special compatibility mode". Why inherit among the million other issues if you don't want to?
Bet they are not starting fresh. Instead of using 35 year old code base they are using 20 year old code base.
You are certainly right at this point. To be honest, I have never looked at the source of LibreOffice and it might be a huge mess. Additionally, the maintainers need to be somewhat cooperative. I could imagine that this is also a problem (developing many years of FOSS makes your personality really toxic unfortunately)
Libre is rooted a bit in 90s design, with an OO object model designed to roughly mirror Microsoft 's COM/DCOM. I'm sure Libre has seen a lot of modernization - and I want that codebase to survive. But it's also nice to have a second option, now.
Old isn't necessarily bad, unless years of decision-making have left it in a massively complex state (see also: Xorg)
The real reason here is that LibreOffice is written in C++, which is falling rapidly out of fashion for modern apps, leading to a smaller supply of developers.
Contrast this with Onlyoffice. Yes, the document engine is still written in C++, however the build tools use more modern items like python and onlyoffice supports having Javascript frontends and scripting, making it easier to source web devs to work on these parts.
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Technical debt is a thing. Everyone says Xorg is too old to be maintained so we have to switch to Wayland for example. I don't know the state of Libre Office but it's possible it simply can't be easily migrated to newer, better tools.
Not the same issue. Wayland was needed because xorg architecture just cannot be backwards compatible and would be super difficult risky to retain legacy. Not the same issue here
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That was my thought and Nextcloud already supports Collabora Office which is a fork of LibreOffice Online I believe.
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I tried Nextcloud. I didn’t find it great for syncing files. I’m the only user of the server and keep getting merge conflicts.
Moved to OpenCloud which has been much more stable, if not as feature rich.
It sure sounds like you're doing something wrong then because almost all of us who use that software don't have that issue.
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