European tech firms will ship the first stable release of Euro-Office next month, giving governments and businesses worldwide a ready-to-run, sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
  • SatyrSack@quokk.auEnglish
    35·
    8 hours ago

    https://github.com/Euro-Office

    Euro-Office liberates the ONLYOFFICE code base

    Euro-Office is based on the ONLYOFFICE Open Source, an AGPL codebase. This code base is being extensively reviewed and cleaned up, with the goal of making it easy to build and contribute to. Why did we resort to a fork, rather than collaborate? Of course, forking should be a last resort. Unfortunately, open collaboration with ONLYOFFICE was not possible, for a number of reasons:

    • Contributing is impossible or greatly discouraged. ONLYOFFICE typically does not review or accept pull requests. Build instructions are unreliable, outdated or just plain broken.
    • The company regularly makes controversial decisions like closing off features in the mobile apps like mobile editing, and the removal of an administrator panel.
    • Lacking transparency. Commit messages, when visible, often just refer to an issue number in an internal issue tracker. There are quite a number of binary blobs and compiled or obfuscated code blobs. Most internal code comments are Russian which makes is hard to work with.
    • The mobile apps are not really open source but just wrappers. Example. The apps have extensive proprietary sections which will need to be re-implemented. Work on this is underway.
    • ONLYOFFICE is a Russian company (despite many attempts to hide this), and nearly all developers reside in Russia. Open Source is a global effort, but current political situation makes collaboration hard and trust difficult to earn. Especially when development is not transparent and open. A lot of users and customers require software that is not potentially influenced or controlled by the Russian government.