Posted by campuscodi 5 hours ago
And don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with starting a business rebranding Nextcloud and keeping your development closed source, as long as you're honest about that, which this initiative is not.
If you're looking for a Nextcloud hoster, there's a long list of partners here [2] that have contractually obligated themselves to contribute back to Nextcloud for every user they onboard.
I thought Nextcloud was released under the AGPL, making this very much not okay by default. So either I misunderstood something or Office.eu got a permission to make non-free modifications? (Going by what you said; I have not dived into this.)
"About Office.eu
Office.eu is a 100% European all-in-one Office Suite collaboration platform. The software is partly built on Nextcloud, the leading European open source platform."
This is literally on the linked page. They are upfront about it.
Surely you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"?
(I am not making this up. That is what it is called now.)
Realistically, though, I think pretty much _all_ office suites have been called [Something] Office, for about the last 30 years. The Google one ("Google Workplace", formerly "Google Apps") is the only exception I can think of, and I wouldn't necessarily take Google's lead in software branding (honestly, until I looked it up for this post, I thought it was still called Google Apps, and I use the damn thing every day).
I think integrated office suites have now entirely died out.
But Google Workspace would probably count as a fully integrated suite.
Most large enterprises, you’d have core business applications running on a mainframe or minicomputer or Unix host, and you’d need a terminal emulator to access them from your PC/microcomputer. A lot of places used mainframe/minicomputer-based email/calendar (e.g. IBM PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, Office/36, OfficeVision; DEC ALL-IN-ONE; DataGeneral CEO; HPMAIL; etc) and centrally hosted word processing systems (e.g. IBM DisplayWriter) were commonly used for document/content management. And then added to that you had services like CompuServe and BBS systems
It is likely the Microsoft Works developers dogfooded its terminal emulator a lot, since at the time Microsoft ran its business on Xenix servers, until they eventually migrated to Windows NT in the first half of the 1990s
One thing that may contribute to Europe's and the world's independence from Office is the notion that it's no longer a term distinctly associated with a Microsoft product.
I don't entirely disagree though because they could have attached some distinguishing prefix or suffix. Maybe that's what the .eu is.
You can't tell me there isn't a few turbo-nerds somewhere in the entire continent of europe that will find the intersection of 6-7 languages to name an EU groupware suite.
Also, English does work as a sort of Lingua Franca across EU countries.
Nothing wrong with it.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-offi...
"Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features."
You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
Microsoft does have a figurative trademark for "Office" with the rectangular icon: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/01141355... - office.eu's logo does not bear any resemblance.
The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that.
So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name.
(I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).
There may be hundreds of other companies selling products with the noun "office" in their names, but there only is one producing a productivity suite called simply "Office". I would expect launching another productivity suite called "Office" would be trademark infringement. Just like I can't release a car called "Beetle" or "Golf".
Microsoft Office.
I doubt Microsoft can own a name as generic as Simply "office".
Office.eu does not hold any resemblance to Microsoft Office in terms of logo, typography, makes no reference to MS, etc.
Of course they can sue. The most competent employees at MS are likely their lawyers and lobbyists anyway.
Case in point:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/off...
And yes. Microsoft branding and marketing is absolutely horrendous.
I mean, I think that ship has probably sailed. Borland Office showed up at about the same time as Microsoft Office, in the late 80s. Then StarOffice, Corel Office, Wordperfect Office, throughout the 90s... If Microsoft had a defensible trademark there, then this would hardly be the first target. And Microsoft barely uses the "Office" brand _itself_, these days, and hasn't for years.
(There is still a product called Microsoft Office, but the thing that most users would think of as MS Office is now, bafflingly, branded "Microsoft 365 Copilot".)
Something like "EuropaOffice" would have followed the historical pattern so it's specifically the lack of an additional qualifier word that's perhaps questionable, not the word "Office."
But it does look like it's always called "Office.EU" in branding so maybe that's enough?
Now, I really, very much dislike it that often discussions on sites like this one can be utterly derailed by someone bringing up an utterly unrelated overhyped topic, so feel free to dismiss this, but I could honestly see LLMs providing a potential path to smoothing out such issues. Some model have gotten rather robust when it comes to making targeted changes to pre-existing Excel files dating back to before I was using a computer, including handling very specific modifications to ancient macros across multiple sheets. Perhaps, this could be leveraged to some extent, though being honest and trying not to overhype, I suspect that similar to those planning to use agentic coding to rewrite decades old, tested, crucially important COBOL code in a more modern language, there are likely many edge cases that will be hard to properly cover and if such a solution isn't both absolutely reliable and seamless to the users, large scale adoption by such entities will likely be impossible in the short term.
There's a bit of an issue with the overload of 'office' in the political context, this being an EU initiative and domain but other than that I say good call.
I mostly interact with smaller contributors to their field, and they tend to be unique and bold, because that's what is needed to be competitive. When they get their uniqueness and boldness out of just being who they are, it doesn't tend to foster the type of uniqueness and boldness needed to make a good product.
Frankly, right now, there is a lot of money to be made in just providing safer alternatives to American cloud stuff. They don't need to be _better_, they just need to be based in a stable jurisdiction.
More seriously, Office is a great word for what the software package does, and it can't be trademarked. You can have Microsoft Office, Libre Office, and Europa Office.
With your average 18-24 year old swimming in Google Docs, Notion, Monday, Airtable and a dozen others..."Office" will belong to the EU in no time.
What is Office EU?
Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.
Mostly adding this because I wasn't sure if it was a new product or not based on a first glance over the Office EU site. Nextcloud offers recommendations for providers on their site, most of which are in the EU [0]. The Office EU website seems to be new since around January of this year [1]. More managed hosts for Nextcloud is a good thing in my book, but I'd be a bit wary to host my stuff with a brand new provider.
[0]: https://nextcloud.com/providers/
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260116234614/https://office.eu...
Regardless of the Nextcloud issue. It's probably just a web wrapper then.
This seems untrustworthy, double so for a product that claims to prioritize transparency.
> Our headquarters are in The Netherlands (The Hague). Contact us to book a meeting or ask any questions.
source: https://office.eu/contact
"The Premium and Ultimate plans offer EU Talk for larger meetings up to ● users."
https://www.nbim.no/no/investeringene/investeringsoversikt/#...
But anyway if you guys could stop forcing Microsoft on everybody that would be great.
It's hard to get numbers on what countries pay to Microsoft. The Dutch parliament has repeatedly asked and has not gotten numbers even though there is a whole agency since 2014 (https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/overzicht-van-alle-onderwerp...) specifically for giving Microsoft preferential treatment in procurement.
I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.
All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.
Tsh, marketing. (see Bill Hicks on marketing).