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Introduction - An Ode to Wykop

Anyone who didn’t grow up under a rock in Poland knows what Wykop is like. Reading the comments, let alone participating there, requires a truly strong psyche and an unwavering sense of self-worth. However, I must admit that I subscribe to Wykop’s front page to know what’s going on, and I like checking this channel in my RSS reader because I always stumble upon something interesting. That’s exactly what happened one Sunday afternoon. I came across this particular find: A new European open-source office suite is being created. Sounds interesting, it’s just a pity that very little of it adds up.

What is Office.EU and what does it offer?

The topic caused quite a buzz because Office.EU positions itself as a 100% European alternative to services from giants like Microsoft or Google. The main driving force behind this service’s marketing is the promise of full digital sovereignty. It’s about making European companies and citizens independent of American corporations and their laws (e.g., the Cloud Act, which theoretically allows US agencies to access data stored by American companies, even if it is physically located in Europe). It sounds like a remedy for the ailments of the modern Internet, but it’s worth taking a closer look.

Who is behind it?

Let’s start with the basics, meaning the company itself. The operator of the service is a Dutch company, EUfforic Europe BV (commercial register number: 98746243). At the head of the project, as CEO, is Maarten Roelfs, whose LinkedIn profile can be found without any problem. A typical guy whose profession is being a CEO. We dig further and here comes the first clash - the official address of the company is Dr. Kuyperstraat 10-A in The Hague. A quick glance at the web and we know that it’s simply a coworking space and a virtual office. Although this is a popular practice, in the case of a loudly announced “alternative to Google,” the lack of its own physical facilities makes things start to smell a bit fishy.

Exact product definition (It’s not LibreOffice!)

Many people online mistakenly compare Office.EU to LibreOffice. On the one hand, looking for a correlation is spot on, because LibreOffice is a European tool, despite its convoluted history. It is worth reminding here that the predecessor of this program – OpenOffice – was once taken over by the American corporation Oracle. Fearing a dictate from the US, the developer community created a branch (a so-called fork) and established the independent The Document Foundation in Germany. That’s how the secure and free LibreOffice was created.

Beyond this aspect, however, the comparison is misguided, because we are talking about completely different categories of products. LibreOffice is a locally installed office suite, consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and a few other components. It is a free and open-source equivalent of Microsoft Office. Office.EU is a completely different story, because it is an entire cloud ecosystem (SaaS). It includes a shared calendar, virtual drive, e-mail, messenger, and integrated online document editors. Hence, the correct comparison here would be Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Repackaging ready-made open-source tools

And here we come to the most important point, which ultimately unmasks the Office.EU revolution. The company did not create any innovative, proprietary code. The platform is simply the popular and free Nextcloud Hub in disguise. This shouldn’t be a surprise, because you can find a mention of this on the project’s official website.

The creators configured ready-made open-source tools (Nextcloud for drive and service management + OnlyOffice/Collabora for editing documents), slapped their logo on it, and are selling it as their own product. They physically keep the data with external providers – they themselves officially declare using the infrastructure of the German company Hetzner. They are pushing to people as a paid service something that any moderately tech-savvy person can set up for free on their own home equipment or a cheap VPS server, thereby gaining 100% control over their files, without the intermediation of another virtual entity of questionable credibility.

But could it be a valid initiative?

You have to hand it to them: the initiative has partially valid foundations. Fighting for digital sovereignty and building alternatives to the behemoths from across the ocean is a good and necessary direction for Europe.

However, personally, I think that in this specific edition, the project is just a blatant cash grab, and one executed along the path of least resistance. They took ready-made, free tools created by enthusiasts, wrapped them in a different graphic design, bought server space, and are selling them to the naive under the guise of a “great, proven, European product” that supposedly cares about our privacy. We are dealing here with a classic parvenu (that is, an upstart, a person without real achievements and class who wants to quickly gain a position), feeding off the fruits of the hard, unpaid labor of other programmers from the open-source movement.

What instead of Office.EU? Proven European alternatives

In my case, it looks like this:

  • locally, as an office suite, I obviously use LibreOffice,

  • whereas, as an analogous solution to Office.EU, I have my own Nextcloud instance, which I additionally share with my family.

Normally, that would close the topic for me, but I felt obliged to check if there really isn’t any European solution offering what Office.EU does. And you know what? It turns out that a quick browse of the Internet revealed that you can easily find three (and probably even more) alternatives.

Instead of trusting startups registered in virtual offices, it’s much better (and safer) to bet on proven European companies that have been building their own infrastructure and reputation for years:

  • Infomaniak kDrive – A Swiss leader owning its own ecological data centers. A powerful and stable service with a drive, e-mail, and documents.

  • Mailbox.org – A highly regarded German provider. They provide a legendarily secure e-mail and a cloud office suite (based on Open-Xchange).

  • Proton Drive – A Swiss company (creators of ProtonMail) that offers services with full end-to-end encryption (E2EE).