Nextcloud, Ionos and other partners are developing an open-source office suite under the project name „Euro-Office“ as an alternative to the market-dominant Microsoft Office.
The two partners are not starting from scratch, but have forked the components of OnlyOffice available as open-source code and want to build on them. In the summer, the software is then intended to replace the previous office component Collabora in Nextcloud and the Ionos Nextcloud Workspace. A ‘technical preview’ is already available on GitHub.
While this is a good news, I think they should move from github, you know microslop copilot…
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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)
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.
Of course this is a matter of how well the maintainers took care of tech debt. Additionally, architectural changes are often not possible or only if you put a lot of effort in it.
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.
I am not sure if this is the real reason. C++ is still a very valid option. People used to low level languages can rather easy switch the language they are writing in.
Maybe one day we will find out the real reason.
Guys u are on slippery slope onlyoffice is russian company just with different name inside russia
Yes they are. That’s why you take only the open parts of it, fork and rewrite replace all the binary blobs. That’s why you do your own change management and ignore the Russians. Read up on how the new project actually works.
oh my god, will Russian egg sacs develop inside my computer and drink all my fruit juice at night??
How can I protect myself and my loved ones?
Ascensio Systems SIA developed it and it’s Latvian… Couldn’t find what you’re referring to, would appreciate a link to the info you’re talking about.
It’s proxy company https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7zlf2/onlyoffice_is_obfuscating_its_russian_ownership
https://www.anti-malware.ru/analytics/Technology_Analysis/Office-suites-available-in-Russia-2025
You got that backwards. Its open office that hasnt been updated in years.
OnlyOffice not OpenOffice
Huh, I didnt realize that was an actual product and not just a mistake.
Only Office is a Russian thing. Euro Office takes all the open source parts of Only Offices, forks them and rewrites stuff only handled by binary blobs.
It’s a quite interesting project, freeing that half-open office suite.
That was my thought and Nextcloud already supports Collabora Office which is a fork of LibreOffice Online I believe.
OpenXchange is also part of the IONOS group. I don’t understand why they don’t focus on one solution to make it as good as possible.