Tuta says it is joining Euro-Office because it sees the project becoming a “truly sovereign alternative” to Microsoft Office.
Last week, we reported that Nextcloud was planning to release the first stable version of Euro-Office on June 9, aiming to offer European organizations a real-time collaborative workspace that runs entirely on open-source infrastructure.
Euro-Office, if you’re not aware, is an office suite designed to break dependence on American tech giants by integrating document and spreadsheet editors directly into existing cloud platforms. The software began as a fork of ONLYOFFICE and now features active co-development by a coalition of European companies, including Nextcloud (Germany), IONOS (Germany), Abilian (France), BTactic (Spain), OpenProject (Germany), Soverin (Netherlands), and XWiki (France).
Now, Tuta is joining the coalition just days before the launch, with the co-founder and CEO, Matthias Pfau, saying:
“We’ve joined Euro-Office because we see great potential for this project to become a truly sovereign alternative with great usability and data protection. It is built by European engineers, people and companies that you can trust, and it is fully open source. This is exactly what we need here at Tuta to compliment our encrypted offerings of Tuta Mail, Tuta Calendar, and Tuta Drive.”
Tuta, in case you’re unaware, is a privacy-focused freemium email and calendar service run by Tutao GmbH, with over 10 million users worldwide. Users know the service for encrypting not just the email body, but also the subject lines, metadata, contacts, and calendar events.
In late 2020, a German court order embroiled the firm in a massive controversy after judges forced the provider to write a software feature that allowed cops to read unencrypted incoming and outgoing emails. This controversial monitoring feature drew heavy criticism from the privacy community at the time, and the developers have since removed the code from the codebase.
Euro-Office, the project Tuta is now contributing to, has also had its own fair share of controversy, despite the fact that the application has not even hit 1.0.0 yet. The project sparked a huge licensing dispute when ONLYOFFICE accused Nextcloud of illegally forking the codebase and removing original branding elements in violation of AGPLv3 terms. Nextcloud defended itself by pointing out that the additional branding restrictions violated open-source guidelines.
