Euro-Office and LaSuite: European Sovereignty Built on American Ground

A quick follow-up to my previous piece on USA lock-in. That article ended on a call to action: Europe needs to stop building on American infrastructure, and the smartest path forward is public investment in open-source foundations. Since then, two projects have caught my eye — one federal, one industry-led — and both prove that Europe is moving, and that the momentum is real. They also, unfortunately, prove that the reflex to build sovereign tools on top of the very platforms we’re trying to escape is still with us.

I spent the last few days testing Euro-Office, the AGPL office suite announced in Berlin in March and released as a stable 1.0 in June¹. This post is a short review of that — and a broader observation about the pattern it belongs to.

What’s actually shipping

Two (maybe more) initiatives worth naming, because they aren’t just press releases:

LaSuite, coordinated by France’s DINUM] (the state’s digital agency), has been running for a few years now. The project brings together a family of tools built for French civil servants: Docs (collaborative document editing, ~16k stars on GitHub — that’s a real user base, not vaporware), Drive, Meet for video calls, Messages for team collaboration, plus Tchap (Matrix-based secure messaging, deployed to hundreds of thousands of state employees). It’s a slow, deliberate rebuild of the productivity stack, tool by tool, in the open. To go further about LaSuite I highly recommand you this video with Samuel Paccoud from À la french .

Euro-Office, launched officially on June 9, 2026, takes a different route: it’s a coalition of European private companies — IONOS, Nextcloud, XWiki, OpenProject, Abilian, Eurostack, Soverin, BTactic, later joined by Open-Xchange and Office EU². Technically it’s built on the OnlyOffice codebase (AGPL-3.0), reworked and repackaged under European governance. It ships as a web suite (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF), integrates with Nextcloud, and handles Microsoft’s OOXML formats out of the box.

I’ve been running it against my Nextcloud instance for the past week.

The good news: it works

The Nextcloud integration is genuinely nice. Documents open in-browser, real-time collaboration works, comments and version history behave the way you’d expect from anyone who’s used Google Docs. Format compatibility with .docx and .xlsx is credible — better than LibreOffice Online in my experience, which was the previous obvious choice for this slot in a self-hosted stack.

The speed at which this came together is what’s striking. From press-preview in March¹ to stable release in June² is a fast cycle for a project involving eight organizations across four or five countries. That happens when the underlying tech is mature (OnlyOffice has years behind it) and when there’s real institutional appetite to converge instead of duplicating effort.

The packaging still needs polish — deployment options are a bit scattered across each participating vendor’s flavor, and there isn’t yet the equivalent of a snap install euro-office or a single canonical Helm chart that would make adoption trivial for a mid-sized organization. That’ll come; it’s the sort of thing that gets sorted out after a first stable release when actual users start filing packaging issues.

Overall: I’d recommend it to anyone currently paying for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It’s not a “1.0 for the brave” — it’s a 1.0 you can put in front of non-technical colleagues.

The awkward part

Here’s the thing that’s been nagging me while I was clicking around. Both Euro-Office and LaSuite host their entire source code on github.com/Euro-Office and github.com/suitenumerique respectively. Every commit, every issue, every pull request, every discussion about the future of European digital sovereignty flows through a platform owned by Microsoft — a company subject to US law, US executive orders, and the CLOUD Act.

I’m not saying this to be smug. The reasons are entirely understandable:

• Habit. Everyone knows GitHub. Onboarding contributors elsewhere is friction.
• CI/CD gravity. GitHub Actions is deeply integrated with everything, and rebuilding a full CI pipeline elsewhere is a real cost.
• Discoverability. A GitHub project shows up in Google, in awesome-* lists, in every developer’s mental model.
• Free tiers. Public repos, unlimited Actions minutes on open source, and hosted issues — it’s hard to beat “free” when your budget is a public sector line item.

Those are all valid, pragmatic reasons. They’re also the exact same reasons I discussed in my previous article on GitHub — the reasons the entire open-source ecosystem ended up dependent on a single US company in the first place. Convenience beats principle, until principle becomes an emergency.

And it has become an emergency, at least in premise. LaSuite’s whole purpose is that the French state cannot depend on Microsoft 365. Euro-Office’s press release² explicitly calls itself “true sovereign office suite” in the same sentence that describes its GitHub-hosted code. There’s a category error somewhere in there. You cannot build sovereign infrastructure on infrastructure whose kill-switch belongs to someone else. The code you ship is sovereign; the process by which you develop, review, and integrate it is not.

The GitHub-Iran precedent³ is the specific one worth remembering: developers in Iran, Syria, and Crimea lost access to their own private repositories when US sanctions changed. Not the code, which was git-cloneable elsewhere — but the collaboration platform, the issues, the PR history, the CI. Overnight. If a comparable US decision affected European public sector projects — hypothetical today, less so tomorrow — LaSuite’s development pipeline would go dark the same way. The code would survive; the ability to maintain it as a distributed team wouldn’t.

What’s the fix, then?

I’m going to keep this article deliberately short on the “how”, because it’s the topic of the next few posts on this blog. But the outline is:

Source control itself needs to be sovereign, not just the applications. That means peer-to-peer platforms like Radicle, self-hosted forges like Forgejo or Gitea federated over ActivityPub, or at minimum EU-jurisdiction-only providers with a clear legal firewall against the CLOUD Act. Any of these fixes the “one executive order takes down a European government service” scenario.

CI/CD needs to move off GitHub Actions. This is the harder half — GHA is genuinely good, and the alternatives (Tekton, Woodpecker, Jenkins, GitLab CI, self-hosted GitHub Actions runners) all have different tradeoffs. But it’s absolutely doable, and in most cases it forces useful architectural discipline (you learn what your builds actually depend on).

The two need to talk to each other. A sovereign forge without a CI story is a museum piece. This is precisely where I’ve been spending my evenings for the past few weeks — building a bridge between Radicle (peer-to-peer code collaboration) and Tekton (cloud-native CI on Kubernetes). It works, end-to-end, and I’ll write it up properly in the coming posts.

Where this leaves us

Euro-Office and LaSuite are both good news. They prove that when European organizations decide to stop wringing their hands and actually ship something, they can — fast, with credible quality, and with real user adoption. That’s a serious rebuttal to the fatalism of “we’ve already lost, might as well pay the Microsoft tax.”

But they also illustrate that sovereignty is a stack, not a product. The office suite is the tip. Underneath it sit the forge, the CI, the container registry, the package repository, the identity provider, the observability stack — and every one of those layers has the same “US-hosted vs. European-hosted” question waiting to be answered. Answering it at the application layer while leaving the development layer American is like putting a French padlock on a door with American hinges.

The next few posts on this blog will walk through what it looks like to answer that question one layer at a time, in a home lab I built to test it. Nothing revolutionary — just a demonstration that the sovereign development pipeline is buildable today, with off-the-shelf open source, if you’re willing to accept some rough edges.

If you’re running Nextcloud, go try Euro-Office. If you’re French public sector, you’re probably already on LaSuite. And if you’re a maintainer of either — thank you, seriously, this stuff matters — but please, put a mirror on a European forge. The next Iran-style sanction event doesn’t have to be a surprise.