An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
The Document Foundation shares its history to rebuke claims made by Euro-Office about being Europe's first open-source office suite. They argue that by hiding its code provenance and defaulting to Microsoft's proprietary format, Euro-Office actually undermines European digital sovereignty rather than supporting it.
All this post does is make The Document Foundation sound petty and butthurt, especially this part:
Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe.
Saying that Euro-Office are an ally of Microsoft is a bit of a stretch. I assume they defaulted to MS format because that's what 99.9999% of the world uses, like it or not.
If Euro-Office are going to be successful, they need to be compatible with MS out of the box. That's just a fact. Maybe that's why LibreOffice has never been able to eat Microsoft's lunch?
I dunno. But this isn't a good look for TDF in my opinion. Sometimes it's just better to say nothing, yanno?
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