Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF - TDF Community Blog
Skip to content
Search for:
Home " Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF
A welcome commitment to open standards — and why it should end with ODF as Euro-Office’s native document format.
The Euro-Office pre-announcement has generated considerable coverage across the European press over the past few days. The Document Foundation welcomes the attention that open standards are receiving — and welcomes still more the commitment the announcement makes to them. Before the discussion settles, we would like to clarify one point and state one expectation.
Several reports have described Euro-Office as "the first European open source office suite." Reading the pre-announcement carefully, we do not find the coalition making that claim, and it is not one we would endorse. Europe has been building free and open source office software for many years: LibreOffice, developed by this Foundation and a worldwide community, is itself European, mature, and far from alone.
The "first" framing appears to have emerged in the speed of a launch day rather than in the text of the announcement. We note it not to claim precedence — precedence is not the point — but because accuracy serves the cause of open standards better than enthusiasm alone.
Read on its merits, the announcement gives a great deal to welcome. The promise to improve support for the OpenDocument Format is precisely what the European free software community has long asked for, and we take it in good faith and with genuine appreciation. We have always held that sovereignty begins with the format, not with the logo on the application — and a coalition that understands this is one worth encouraging.
We would also state an expectation, in the spirit of encouragement rather than demand. Improved support is a beginning, not a destination. A format that is merely supported is one a suite can read and write as a courtesy, while a native format is the one in which its documents are created, stored, and trusted across the years — and that is precisely where digital sovereignty is won or lost.
The only destination consistent with the sovereignty Euro-Office invokes is ODF as its native document format. A genuinely European, genuinely sovereign office suite cannot treat the open standard as a concession to outsiders, it has to speak ODF as its mother tongue. The Document Foundation looks forward to that moment, and will be glad to acknowledge it when it comes.
Related Posts
LibreOffice project and community recap: May 2026
2026-06-10
Join the LibreOffice team as a paid system administrator, working on TDF’s infrastructure (full-time, remote, m/f/d)
2026-06-082026-06-08
An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
2026-06-082026-06-08
Leave a Reply Cancel reply<br>You must be logged in to post a comment.
What is LibreOffice?<br>LibreOffice is a free and private office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office / 365. It is open source and has regular updates with new features and improvements.
Search
Search for:
TDF Planet<br>QA/Dev Report: May 2026<br>Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF<br>LibreOffice project and community recap: May 2026<br>Join the LibreOffice team as a paid system administrator, working on TDF’s infrastructure (full-time, remote, m/f/d)<br>An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement<br>Firebird Adds Unix Domain Socket Support<br>The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.4<br>QA/Dev Report: April 2026<br>How Firebird’s New Parallel Sort Changes Everything<br>Help Us Test the New Firebird Docker Images
Meta
Log in
Entries feed
Comments feed
WordPress.org
Press Releases
The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.4
Berlin, 5 June 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.4, the fourth maintenance update to…
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 25.8.7
Berlin, 12 May 2026 - The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.8.7, the final maintenance release of the…
Twenty Years On, ODF Is Still the Only Open Standard for Office Documents, and the Only One Governments Can Trust
Berlin, 8 May 2026 – Twenty years ago this week, on 3 May 2006, the Open Document Format cleared its…
Open Document Format
Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF
A welcome commitment to open standards — and why it should end with ODF as Euro-Office's native document format. The…
An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is…
A Standard in Name Only: What OOXML Transitional Tells Us About Format Sovereignty
When a public administration is told its documents are stored in "an ISO standard format," the assumption is reasonable: an…
Options
Consent Management
Privacy Policy
Thank you for visiting our website and...