Default to Europe
For the first time, Europe has a serious open-source office suite, built here, hosted here, funded here. That is worth something. Now make it matter.
Euro-Office shipped last week. A web-based office suite (documents, spreadsheets, presentations) built by Nextcloud and Ionos, hosted on European cloud infrastructure, released as open source. The first stable version is out. Desktop apps are coming. This is real.
The instinct to immediately qualify it with yes, but should be resisted. European software infrastructure has genuine gaps, and closing one of them is worth acknowledging without immediately pivoting to the ten that remain. Something was built. It works. It runs on servers that are not subject to the CLOUD Act. That is progress.
Now let’s talk about the law. Not to regulate Euro-Office, but to give it the ground it needs to win.
What the CLOUD Act actually means
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, signed in 2018, requires US cloud providers to hand over data stored on their servers to US law enforcement, regardless of where those servers are physically located. A document saved to Microsoft 365 by a civil servant in Berlin, processed on a Microsoft data center in Amsterdam, is accessible to US authorities on request. Not theoretically. Legally.
European governments have known this for years. Most have carried on using Microsoft anyway: the software is good, the integration is deep, and the political cost of migrating is real while the legal exposure is abstract. The exposure only becomes concrete when it matters, which is precisely when you can no longer fix it.
Euro-Office running on Ionos or OVH changes this. The CLOUD Act doesn’t reach European providers. The legal exposure disappears, not because of a regulation, but because of an architectural choice.
Why it took this long
The answer is procurement culture. Public institutions default to established vendors not because alternatives don’t exist, but because the cost of being wrong falls asymmetrically on the official who made the call. Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. Nobody gets promoted for a successful migration to an open-source alternative most of their colleagues have never heard of. The rational institutional choice and the correct strategic choice have been pointing in opposite directions for twenty years.
The technology caught up. The incentives haven’t.
What legislation can actually do
Funding matters, and Europe has started to provide it through programs like Sovereign Tech Fund and various national equivalents. The more powerful interventions are structural. They change the default. They shift the burden of justification.
Flip the procurement default. EU institutions, and member state governments procuring with EU funds, should be required to default to European open-source solutions where a viable alternative exists. Not preferred. Default. The burden of justification flips: why are you buying Microsoft? A department that can answer that question clearly should be free to do so. One that cannot should be using Euro-Office.
Mandate interoperability, in both directions. Microsoft Office has never rendered ODF documents perfectly, and this is not an accident. Force every dominant office platform operating in the EU market to guarantee full, documented, tested interoperability with open document formats. Make degraded rendering of ODF files an antitrust concern, not a compatibility curiosity.
Remove Microsoft from job requirements. Across European public sector job postings, “proficiency in Microsoft Office” is listed as a requirement so routinely it has stopped registering as a policy choice. It is one. It encodes a vendor dependency into HR pipelines and trains the next generation of civil servants to see proprietary software as the neutral default. Ban it. Require digital literacy.
Start in schools. Children who learn on Euro-Office don’t need to be migrated later. Training time, lost productivity, institutional resistance: these are the real costs of migration, and they are the single biggest obstacle to adoption. Eliminate them at the source.
Create a safe harbour for migration. The career risk of a failed migration shapes decisions in ways that policy rarely acknowledges. A framework protecting officials from personal liability for good-faith transitions to qualified open-source alternatives would remove one of the most persistent institutional brakes on adoption.
The point about regulatory power
Europe is good at writing rules. The critique of that instinct, one I’ve made here before, is that Europe regulates things it is not building, and ends up governing a race it is not running.
Euro-Office is a case where Europe is running. The question is whether the regulatory apparatus can be pointed at supporting what Europe builds rather than only at restricting what arrives from elsewhere. These instruments are coherence, not protectionism. A continent that spends billions on Microsoft licenses while funding open-source alternatives on the side is running two contradictory habits simultaneously.
The default matters more than the exception. Change it.