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Наталя ХандусенкоHot News
10 June 2026, 16:30
2026-06-10
Russian footprint found in European Microsoft Office alternative — Euro-Office: here's what the code shows
Euro-Office, which is positioned as a European alternative to Microsoft Office, found that most of the program's code appears to have been written by developers with the Russian time zone in the settings. The fact is that this project is a branch of the popular office suite OnlyOffice. The latter's trademark belongs to the Latvian company Ascensio System SIA, and its ultimate beneficiaries are registered in Singapore. And although the company publicly states that it has completely left the Russian market, a recent analysis of the code suggests the opposite.
Euro-Office, which is positioned as a European alternative to Microsoft Office, found that most of the program's code appears to have been written by developers with the Russian time zone in the settings. The fact is that this project is a branch of the popular office suite OnlyOffice. The latter's trademark belongs to the Latvian company Ascensio System SIA, and its ultimate beneficiaries are registered in Singapore. And although the company publicly states that it has completely left the Russian market, a recent analysis of the code suggests the opposite.
Euro-Office is a fork of the open-source software developed by the Russian-linked OnlyOffice project, and the company has been outspoken about it. In March, it announced the split, promising to "liberate" the OnlyOffice source code and citing both technical and geopolitical reasons for the move.
This is reported by Cybernews, whose information security team conducted research before the launch of Euro-Office on June 9.
According to the researchers' findings, only a small portion of the code can be attributed to the European consortium behind Euro-Office (mainly the German company Nextcloud), while up to 99% of the code is related to work done in Russian time zones. Furthermore, Euro-Office continues to pull in fresh Russian code even after the OnlyOffice split in March, particularly components that run on the network, which raises security concerns.
What does the code say?
Although Euro-Office formally separated from OnlyOffice in March, Cybernews has learned that the project continues to implement some code changes created by OnlyOffice developers after the split. In particular, this applies to the server components that provide online collaboration, including viewing and editing spreadsheets, documents, and presentations.
Every time a developer saves changes while writing code, those changes are assigned a unique fingerprint code, making it impossible for two related projects to have the same fingerprint. However, Cybernews examined Euro-Office's code and found that it shares thousands of fingerprints with OnlyOffice.
The most recent shared change dates back to March 5, 2026, when Euro-Office forked from OnlyOffice version 9.3.1. Older shared changes are signed by OnlyOffice staff, while Euro-Office itself has only added 184 of its own changes since then.
Code analysis showed that Euro-Office continued to pull in newer OnlyOffice developments. According to Cybernews researchers, changes related to developers from the Moscow time zone between December 2025 and March 2026 were added to Euro-Office by Nextcloud employees after the split.
Euro-Office is a fork of the OnlyOffice code. Analysis shows that 98.6% of its document engine and 99.2% of its interactive services component were originally written by developers based in Russian time zones, while the contribution of European authors is approximately 0.5%.
Euro-Office imported about 370 changes from OnlyOffice developers into its backend service, while its own developers only made about 20 changes.
Omsk, Yekaterinburg and Samara
OnlyOffice claims that its code is developed by experts from 24 countries. According to Cybernews researchers, the time zone data does not indicate nationality or physical location, but is a technical clue that helps to understand where the work was likely done.
"Since some countries still use summer/winter time, it is interesting to note that in some comits the time zone did not change at all in winter. This may indicate a narrower range of countries in which the person is located," the researchers noted.
An analysis of about 15,600 changes in the OnlyOffice code base conducted by Cybernews found that approximately 90% of them were made in Moscow time.
This figure rises to 99.5% when other Russian time zones, such as Omsk, Yekaterinburg, and Samara, are included. Only one change was linked to Latvia, where the company is officially registered.
The Euro-Office developers noted on the project's GitHub page that they are currently reviewing and cleaning up the OnlyOffice code base, and that the fork itself was a "last resort" due to technical and geopolitical reasons.
They stated that contributing to OnlyOffice’s source code was “impossible or highly undesirable,” while the company itself “regularly makes controversial decisions” and demonstrates a lack of transparency. They also claim that OnlyOffice is a Russian company, “despite numerous attempts to hide it.”
Let us remind you that leading European cloud service and software providers are involved in the development of Euro-Office: Nextcloud, IONOS, Eurostack, Proton, XWiki, OpenProject and others.
