An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement - TDF Community Blog
blog.documentfoundation.org
Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty. 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
  • Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
    10·
    9 days ago

    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.