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?
Subscribe for more!
You don't have to keep coming back here to read my latest waffle. There's a couple of way to subscribe to receive updates whenever I publish new content.