The Future of EU Strategic Independence in the Software Department Is Russian

The password manager currently trusted by Irish government agencies, German technical universities, Belgian public IT providers and Dutch critical infrastructure is Passwork. It is marketed as a proud European product - Finnish roots, Spanish company, Made in EU badge, GDPR and NIS2 compliance plastered everywhere.

It was written by Russian devs.

The office suite that European administrations keep trying to push as the sovereign alternative to Microsoft is EuroOffice, a fork of OnlyOffice. Also written by Russian devs.

This is the market speaking with perfect clarity.

When European institutions need software that actually works - self-hosted, auditable, enterprise-grade, something people will voluntarily use because it works - they end up with products that originated in Arkhangelsk or Moscow.

There is no serious European competitor in this category. There are plenty of funded projects, research consortia, and “sovereign cloud” slide decks. There is almost nothing that ships, stays maintained, and doesn’t collapse under real organisational load.

Fortunately, Europe has developed an elegant solution to this engineering shortage: software laundering through jurisdiction.

OnlyOffice provided the complete working model. After its developers had spent years building a mature browser-based office suite, Nextcloud, IONOS and their partners forked the AGPL-licensed code, removed the OnlyOffice identity and introduced Euro-Office as a triumph of European digital sovereignty.

OnlyOffice objected. Nextcloud suspended the partnership. Lawyers discussed attribution, trademarks and licence conditions. By June, the disagreement had been declared resolved after Euro-Office added the required notices.

The fork, naturally, remained.

The original developers received acknowledgement. They did not receive royalties, a share of future government contracts or an automatic payment every time their engineering was presented to a European ministry beneath a blue flag.

This is entirely legal under the licence, which is great, because strategic autonomy becomes much easier when somebody else has already completed the work.

Passwork’s European face gets its updates from a UAE free-zone entity still connected to the original Russian developers. The Russian twin is FSTEC- and FSB-certified and used by defence contractors. The two products stay technologically close enough that release notes drop a day apart.

European governments and universities continue selecting the product anyway.

And why should they not?

Russian developers are apparently a dangerous dependency while writing the software, but once the code has crossed a border, acquired a Spanish address and received a GDPR page, it becomes a pillar of European resilience.

This is the true achievement of EU strategic software policy. Europe no longer needs to build globally competitive software itself. It merely needs to identify working foreign products, relocate the branding, add compliance documentation and ensure that future public contracts are awarded within the correct regulatory ecosystem.