Two Hungarian universities, Eötvös University and Szeged University, have signed the contract for 34,000 copies of EuroOffice.

EuroOffice is a derivative of Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It is accompanied by a set of free and non-free extensions (in professional license). EuroOffice is developed by Hungarian company MultiRacio and unsurprisingly, it provides great support for Hungarian language.

The EuroOffice will be university staff and students (around 45,000). The Hungarian government decided to promote the use of EuroOffice and ODF in schools and universities. Since the Hungarian company MultiRacio is involved heavily in ODF specification and works on Officeshots, the contract was awarded to EuroOffice rather than the popular and obvious choice of OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Localisation was also a big factor in the selection of EuroOffice. MultiRacio’s senior software developer cited the following reason:

“Our version comes with many additional functions targeting Hungarian users, including a grammar and spell checker, a hyphenation tool and thesaurus. Its Map Chart adds extra geographic detail on Hungarian territory.

In my opinion, universities are the best place to spread Open Source product. Last time it was French university dumping Adobe Photoshop for Krita and I believe that Eotvos and Szeged won’t be the last.