this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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They are not. They are pointing out how innefectual the Euro-Office setup is in the context of EU Digital Sovereignty. If the EU wants to free its document stack from dependencies it makes no sense that they'd pick a product that only supports OOXML, which is fully controlled by Microsoft. (And riddled with Russian spyware, but that's the icing on the cake.)
And speaking of OOXML, let's get some things straight:
It has never been truly open. It was demonstrated back in 2006 and time and time again that Microsoft doesn't publish the full spec and that they obfuscate what they do publish. It is impossible to fully support what comes out of the latest MS Office in an open manner.
Yes, because back in 2006 Microsoft asked their vendors in all ISO-voting countries to join the ISO committees and vote in favor of OOXML. A practice which the ISO was completely unprepared for, but also did absolutely nothing to correct.
ISO/IEC 29500 is a joke and choosing to enforce as an EU-wide standard is a joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Complaints_about_the_national_bodies_process
Which is why LibreOffice, or a similar product that supports both OOXML and ODF should have been chosen.
That has to be taken into account for migration but it doesn't mean we have to keep being tied to Microsoft.
Euro-Office and OnlyOffice don't "only support" OOXML. Where did you get that idea?
And not every software developed in Russia is "riddled with Russian spyware." The code is open so where do you suppose all this supposed spyware is hiding? Or is that just fear-mongering?
I'd love for LibreOffice to do a serious modernization to be a viable alternative. But for most users, it feels like a downgrade whether or not it is technically better under the hood. I use OnlyOffice these days even though it has a lot more bugs because the UX is just that much better in spite of it.
From the fact ODF "support" is an awkward import/export function. It's not a first class format.
On their live service. They don't publish the spyware with the code they choose to open, obviously. 😃
I thought Onlyoffice supported both formats, but apparently you're right; OOXML gets native support and ODF is treated by the developers as an import/export process (based on the comments there).
To the end user, that makes it look like OOXML is the default and ODF is an inconvenient second option you have to manually choose, but the issues probably run much deeper than that.
Russian ownership of OPENOFFICE is why this Euro fork exists.
OnlyOffice is not related to OpenOffice. OnlyOffice is developed by Ascensio System which has labored to obscure their Russian backing.
Whereas StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice is a product officially developed by Sun, then donated to the Apache Foundation, then forked as LibreOffice governed by The Document Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_derivative_software