Euro-Office’s announcement – which sees IONOS, Nextcloud and other companies coming together to create a European alternative to office productivity software – has predictably sparked a wave of comments. Most of these focus on the issue of licensing: is the code open source? Who controls the repository? What are the conditions for forking, modifying or implementing it?
While these are all valid questions, they fail to address the most important issue. The fact that almost no one is asking the question that matters tells us something significant about how the debate on digital sovereignty has been framed and who benefits from that framing.
A licence tells you who owns the software, while the format tells you who owns the data
A licence can be renegotiated, modified or updated. The history of FLOSS is full of projects that have changed governance models, divided communities, or changed course under new management. Licence terms are important, but they operate at the level of the software artefact.
The native document format operates at a completely different level. It is the encoding level of every document produced, archived, and exchanged by institutions that adopt the software. It is the invisible structure of administrative memory within which public documents exist for years, or even generations. It is the infrastructure.
If Euro-Office is supplied with OOXML as the default native format – even if it is wrapped in an open licence, hosted on European servers or governed by a European legal entity – every document drafted by public administrations, schools and institutions will be written in a format designed around the behaviour of a single vendor’s application.
OOXML is governed by a specification that is so complex and internally inconsistent that it compromises interoperability. As if that were not enough, it is optimised for backward compatibility with Microsoft Office rather than for seamless exchange between systems.
The licensing issue asks: who controls the code? The format issue asks: who controls the data? These are not equivalent situations. The latter has long-term implications for public archives, administrative continuity, and the practical significance of vendor independence.
For thirty years, the FLOSS and digital rights communities have been working on licences based on the fundamental principle that a licence equals freedom. This work has produced enormous value, but it has also created an unintentional blind spot.
Microsoft has spent decades conducting one of the most effective user education campaigns in the history of the software industry. However, what it has taught is dependency. Consequently, a generation of users, administrators, developers and even FLOSS advocates has grown up treating OOXML documents as the natural unit of document exchange — just like water flowing from a tap. OOXML files are not perceived as a lock-in mechanism, but as normal documents.
This is an incredible strategic achievement. Microsoft has managed to transform a proprietary file format, which was designed to replicate the behaviour of its own applications rather than enable transparent content exchange, into an interoperability standard.
Compatibility with the OOXML format is not viewed as a courtesy to the monopoly holder; rather, it has become a feature that alternative software must provide to prove its legitimacy. Lock-in has been transformed into an advantage: users are not trapped in Microsoft’s format; they are simply using the format that everyone else uses.
The FOSS community, which should be particularly vigilant about such dynamics, has often uncritically accepted Microsoft’s approach. Indeed, when evaluating an alternative productivity suite, the first question is often about the ability to open OOXML files rather than about the native format and whether it enables interoperability. Unfortunately, the alternative is judged according to criteria subtly dictated by Microsoft.
Consequently, format policy is treated as a secondary technical issue rather than the major political issue it really is. Meanwhile, Microsoft has pursued a precise and successful strategy of securing OOXML certification as an ISO standard to define it as ‘open’, while ensuring that licensing issues take precedence over format issues.
The result is that “supporting ODF” has become a box to tick rather than a specific commitment. This explains why all office suites today claim to support ODF. The practical implications of this support – such as whether ODF is the native or default format, or the format in which documents are created and stored without user intervention – are rarely considered, let alone addressed.
The test that matters
Euro-Office presents itself as a genuine European alternative: an infrastructure project for digital sovereignty. This claim deserves to be put to the test in terms of whether institutions will manage to free themselves from Microsoft lock-in, or if they will simply reproduce it under a different banner.
The test is simple and admits only one answer: ODF will be the native format of Euro-Office; the format in which documents are created, stored, and exchanged by default without user configuration or technical intervention.
Not: Euro-Office supports ODF because, in a nominal sense, everything supports ODF. Users can save in ODF format because this is a compatibility feature, not a commitment to true digital sovereignty.
If the answer is yes, then Euro-Office represents a significant structural break with the dominant proprietary format. However, if the answer implies “compatibility”, “user choice”, “transition paths” or “broad format support”, then Euro-Office is, regardless of the licence, a server migration that leaves Microsoft’s lock-in on data unchanged.
Digital sovereignty is not achieved by changing who hosts the software, but by changing the format in which data is encoded. European institutions, public administrations, and civil society organisations considering Euro-Office deserve a direct and immediate answer to this question before making any further commitments.
ODF has to be native, default, and by design.
Since its foundation, the Document Foundation has supported ODF as an open standard for document exchange. ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) is the only document format standard designed from the outset to ensure interoperability, long-term preservation, and total vendor independence.