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In March 2026, a coalition of European technology companies stood up in the Bundestag and announced they were forking one of the most popular open-source office suites. By June, the fork had shipped. Euro-Office is the result: a European-governed version of OnlyOffice, created for the explicit purpose of escaping the original’s Russian origins. It is the most interesting thing to happen in the office-suite world in years, and also the most misunderstood.
This is the story of why it happened, who is behind it, and the uncomfortable nuance at its centre, namely that forking the governance of a project does not instantly change who wrote the code. If you are evaluating sovereign office suites, Euro-Office is essential to understand, because it is a live test of what “European sovereignty” actually means in software.
Short verdict:
- Euro-Office is a 2026 European fork of OnlyOffice, led by Nextcloud and IONOS, created to put the suite under European governance and ownership.
- Its sovereignty is real at the level of control and accountability, but the code it inherited was still overwhelmingly written by Russian-timezone developers, so “sovereign” here means governance, not provenance.
- Watch this one closely. It is promising and important, but it is young, and its founding came with a licensing fight worth understanding.
One name, two completely different products
Before anything else, clear up the confusion that trips up half the coverage. There are two things spelled almost the same way, and they have nothing to do with each other.
Euro-Office, hyphenated, is the new 2026 fork of OnlyOffice that this article is about. EuroOffice, one word, is an old Hungarian office suite based on LibreOffice and OpenOffice, made by a vendor called MultiRáció and promoted in Hungarian schools. It is unrelated to OnlyOffice, to Russia, and to the sovereignty story entirely. If you see a source claiming “EuroOffice forked the Russian suite,” it is almost certainly garbling the new product. Mind the hyphen, and this whole topic gets clearer.
With that out of the way, the Euro-Office worth talking about is the European fork.
The setup: why anyone would fork OnlyOffice
To understand the fork you have to understand what it forked away from. OnlyOffice is an excellent open-source suite developed by a Latvia-registered company, but with documented Russian origins: it grew out of a Russian parent, remained under that ownership until 2023, and shares a lineage with R7-Office, the office suite widely deployed across the Russian public sector. A 2026 code analysis found the overwhelming majority of the engine was authored in Russian time zones, with the analysts themselves cautioning that time zone is a clue, not proof of present-day nationality or location.
For a private company none of that may matter. For European public administrations under pressure to remove both US and Russian-linked dependencies from critical software, it matters a great deal. OnlyOffice has restructured and published a detailed defence of its independence, but the provenance question would not go away, and an open-source licence means anyone who is unhappy can take the code and run. That is exactly what happened.
Who is behind Euro-Office
Euro-Office is not a hobby fork. It is backed by a European consortium led by two German heavyweights, the open-source cloud company Nextcloud and the hosting provider IONOS, joined by others including Eurostack, XWiki, and OpenProject. The project was announced at the Bundestag on 27 March 2026 and shipped its first stable public release on 9 June 2026. Sources: Euro-Office overview and The Register.
Its stated rationale is blunt. The project’s own materials argue that OnlyOffice is effectively a Russian-rooted product despite its restructuring, and that European institutions need an office suite whose governance, ownership, and accountability sit unambiguously in Europe. The broader goal is the one running through this whole field: reduce European dependence on vendors, American and Russian alike, whose home jurisdiction could become a problem.
That is a serious, well-resourced effort with real companies and real political backing behind it. This is what a credible sovereignty fork looks like.
The uncomfortable nuance
Here is the part that honest coverage cannot skip, and that breathless coverage gets wrong: forking the project did not rewrite the code.
Euro-Office is forked from OnlyOffice’s AGPL-licensed codebase, which means it inherited that same overwhelmingly Russian-authored code, Russian-language comments and all. In the period after the fork it also continued merging server-side changes from upstream OnlyOffice, so the great majority of post-fork commits still trace back to OnlyOffice’s developers rather than to the consortium’s own engineers. Critics, including the rival vendor Collabora, have pointed to exactly this: the “sovereign” suite is, at the code level, still very much the suite it forked.
So what does Euro-Office’s sovereignty actually buy you? Governance and control, not provenance. The ownership, the accountability, the roadmap, and the legal home are European. The code, for now, is largely the inherited OnlyOffice engine. That is not a scandal, it is simply how forks begin, and over time the consortium can diverge, audit, and rewrite. But anyone selling Euro-Office as “European code” today is overstating it, and anyone buying it should understand they are buying European stewardship of a Russian-origin codebase, which is a meaningfully different and more modest claim. For some buyers that distinction is the entire point; for others it is enough.
The licensing fight
The fork did not happen quietly. OnlyOffice accused Euro-Office of violating the AGPLv3 by stripping out OnlyOffice’s branding and attribution requirements when it redistributed the code. Euro-Office and its supporters, including Nextcloud and free-software legal commentators, argued that the requirements in question were optional, unenforceable additions that may lawfully be removed on redistribution. Source: Computerworld.
The dispute had real fallout: OnlyOffice suspended its partnership with Nextcloud at the end of March 2026. By the time the stable release shipped in June, reporting indicated the licensing allegations had been treated as resolved or dropped. For an IT team, the lesson is less about who was right and more about the fork’s youth: it was born in conflict, its legal footing was contested in public, and that is the normal turbulence of a project this new and this political. It is not a reason to dismiss it, but it is a reason to treat it as early-stage rather than settled.
What it means for IT teams today
So should you deploy Euro-Office? The honest answer in 2026 is: evaluate it seriously, deploy it carefully, and keep your expectations calibrated.
If your organization needs an office suite under European governance specifically to satisfy a procurement or political requirement that rules out Russian-linked vendors, Euro-Office is built precisely for you, and the backing of Nextcloud and IONOS means it is more than a flag-planting exercise. It is also reassuring that it is OnlyOffice-compatible, so you inherit the strong Microsoft-format fidelity that made the original popular.
Temper that with its reality. It is a young fork still closely tracking upstream, its independence from the original codebase is a direction rather than a finished fact, and it arrived amid a licensing dispute. Treat it as a promising project to pilot and watch, not as a mature product to bet the whole organization on overnight. If you need maximum stability today and provenance is not your constraint, the original OnlyOffice or a LibreOffice-family option may serve you better while Euro-Office matures.
Final verdict
Euro-Office is the most important sovereignty story in the office-suite world right now, because it tests the idea in public. It is a serious, well-backed European fork of OnlyOffice, created for a real reason, and it gives organizations that cannot accept Russian-linked software a credible European-governed option with strong Microsoft-format compatibility built in.
Just hold the nuance. Its sovereignty is about governance and accountability, not about who wrote the code, which is still largely inherited from OnlyOffice. It is young, it began in a licensing fight, and it is tracking upstream closely. That makes it a project to pilot, support, and follow rather than a finished destination, and a genuinely encouraging sign that European digital sovereignty is moving from slogans to shipping software.
For the suite it forked, see our OnlyOffice review, and for the wider field our hub on sovereign office suites.
