All the posts we have dedicated to the OOXML format – and many of those we will dedicate to it in future – analyse the reasons why it is a proprietary format despite having been approved by ISO as a standard, open format. However, they do not address the reasons behind or the details of the standardisation process.

This is a gap we hope to fill with this post, which summarises the events that took place between the standardisation of the ODF format – a standard and open format – and the standardisation process for OOXML, as well as the process itself, which was completely broken in every respect, from methodology to procedure.

Microsoft had begun work on an XML-based document format around the year 2000, with the aim of modernising the obsolete DOC, XLS and PPT formats, which were simply the serialisation (writing) of memory content to disc, and as such were no longer in line with the evolution of Microsoft Office.

The aim was certainly not to develop a standard format, not least because the echo of Bill Gates’ internal memo – “allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company; we have to make sure that Office documents depend on proprietary capabilities” (slightly abridged version of the original memo) – had not yet died down.

Consequently, during the ODF standardisation process, Microsoft had stated that it would not support the ODF standard format, as it was not in its own interests.

In early 2006, however, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – one of the historic states of the confederation – announced that it would adopt ODF for all public documents, so that they would be independent of software from a single vendor.

This decision provoked a reaction from Microsoft, which could not tolerate the fact that a US state was adopting a standard, open format developed outside its control, which benefited users rather than its own commercial interests.

The story of the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard”

The battle over the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard” – the ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML format between 2006 and 2008 – is a perfect example of a broken standardisation process.

It is not an exceptional case, but it has been thoroughly documented and offers important food for thought for all those who continue to maintain that the OOXML format is a standard.

The story began in December 2006, when Ecma International – whose Technical Committee 45, responsible for the project, at the time was chaired by two Microsoft employees – submitted the OOXML specification to the ISO/IEC JTC1 (Joint Technical Committee) of ISO/IEC for adoption as an international standard under the “fast-track” procedure, designed for tried-and-tested specifications requiring only administrative ratification.

The decision to submit a 6,000-page specification – one of the longest ever submitted to ISO – via a process designed for short and fairly well-established documents had a decisive impact on the nature of the review to which the standard was subjected.

In September 2007, the proposal was rejected by ISO members due to votes against it or substantial technical objections to its approval. Brazil raised more than sixty technical objections regarding the use of non-standard date formats and inadequate language support. India contested the incompatibility with the ISO ODF standard. France proposed splitting the specification into a “clean” core and a compatibility layer for pre-existing systems. Norway submitted twelve specific technical observations.

These concerns were not mere complaints but went to the heart of the matter: namely, whether the OOXML format specifications could meet the fundamental requirements of an international standard.

Issues at national standardisation committees

What followed this vote was the subject of appeals by numerous national standardisation bodies. In many countries, there were widely documented reports of serious irregularities in the composition and conduct of the national technical committees.

In Portugal, new members appeared, the majority of whom were identified as Microsoft business partners. In Italy, the number of members rose from 5 to over 80 in just a few months, and among them were one law firm and a PR agency working for Microsoft on topics that had no connection whatsoever with the document formats, and several Microsoft business partners.

In Norway, the committee chair resigned in protest.

Martin Bryan, coordinator of the ISO working group, stated publicly that the influx of these new members, whose sole interest was to speed up the OOXML approval process, had caused several important procedural votes to fail.

Microsoft sent an official letter to the Spanish national body claiming that the Andalusian regional government supported OOXML, a claim which was promptly denied by the Andalusian government itself, which also lodged a complaint.

As interested observers of the process, and as members of various national standardisation bodies, we can add that all this stemmed from the head-to-head competition between Microsoft and IBM, which at the time were focused solely on competing with one another on the basis of their financial strength and completely ignored the interests of users – a situation that is now penalising us at every level.

Had the two companies invested the same energy in developing a cross-platform standard format, building on what had already been approved – namely ODF – and improving those parts where it was not yet fully developed, instead of filling the committees with “relatives and friends”, we would be in a completely different situation today, and we would not have to fight for our digital sovereignty.

The Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva

In February 2008, the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) was convened in Geneva, during which representatives of national bodies were expected to examine the thousands of proposed amendments to the 6,000-page document in just one week. An unachievable goal.

Many national bodies reported that they had been unable to examine the actual text on which they were supposed to vote, as the final version of the specification had not been submitted. The BRM coordinator, Dr Alex Brown, subsequently stated publicly that failing to make the final text available to national bodies during the appeal period had been irresponsible.

The standard was approved in April 2008, narrowly meeting the required threshold. Appeals lodged by South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, India and other countries against procedural irregularities were rejected by the ISO Technical Committee. A post-approval analysis revealed that, during the BRM, Microsoft employees and “partners” outnumbered representatives from every other organisation by a ratio of approximately ten to one.

The OOXML format today

Microsoft launched Office 2010, implementing not the approved “Strict” variant of ISO 29500, but the earlier “Transitional” variant rejected by ISO in the September 2007 vote, which had been deemed unsuitable for use in new documents. Alex Brown, the BRM coordinator who had overseen the approval, publicly accused Microsoft of acting in bad faith.

The “Transitional” variant of the OOXML format is the one used by all users of Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365, as well as by clones of the two suites such as OnlyOffice, WPS Office and Euro-Office. The “Strict” variant has disappeared from discussions and is the last – and most obscure – option in the format menu.

The responsibilities of standardisation bodies

The case of the ISO 29500 standard demonstrates that standardisation processes, however well designed, can be manipulated by companies with sufficient resources and motivation.

The fast-track procedure was abused. The composition of the national committee was manipulated. The procedural rules were interpreted in such a way as to favour the proposer. The sheer volume of the specification made a genuine technical review by independent experts practically impossible within the available timeframe.

Following approval, a variant of the standard different from the one approved was implemented, without any consequences. Indeed, we can legitimately argue that the advantages the company derived from this failure to comply with the standard were actually rewarded by the market, and were not sanctioned by any authority at any level.

The conditions that allowed ISO 29500 to develop as it did – the concentration of resources, the decisive influence of commercial strategies and objectives, and the asymmetry in investment between large and small companies – were not addressed by the reform of the JTC1 “fast-track” procedure following the OOXML scandal.

Standards bodies are, nominally, neutral arbiters – forums where conflicting interests negotiate shared solutions – but in practice their neutrality is always contested and never guaranteed.

The companies that invest most heavily in the standardisation process – sending more representatives to meetings, funding the secretariats, and having the resources to comment exhaustively on every draft – are also those that exert the greatest influence over the processes.

This does not mean that standardisation bodies are subject to pressure or corrupt, as most operate with a sincere commitment to their mission.

It does, however, mean that the conditions underpinning good standards are not automatic, but require the active participation of various stakeholders – governments, civil society organisations and the academic community – whose interests are not aligned with those of commercial companies, as well as a set of rules that prevent any single company from dominating the process.

Above all, they require a culture within the standards community that takes the principles of reusability, transparency and genuine interoperability seriously as values, and not merely as rhetorical, superficial commitments, which conceal specific commercial strategies.

The announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 had a noticeable positive effect on download figures, which have since exceeded one million per week, totalling 9.4 million downloads over eight weeks, from 24 August to 18 October.

To these must be added updates for the Windows version, which are counted separately and are not included in the download figures, and downloads of older versions, which continue to be fairly high.
The three maps, generated automatically by Matomo, show, in order, visits to the downloads site (11,426,169), visits to the updates site (90,042,601), and visits to the site for older versions (39,669,854).

Anyone curious to know the origin of the visits (which is obviously higher than the number of downloads) can download a ZIP file containing the three CSV files. These figures are reliable but not precise to the nearest unit, as a visit does not necessarily result in a download, particularly in the case of updates and older versions.

Prior to the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8, the number of downloads was less than one million per week, although it was fairly close to that figure. In 2026, the number of downloads has grown dramatically compared to 2025, to the extent that the total for the year has already been exceeded, with 10 weeks still to go.

What are the reasons for this growth? It is difficult to explain based on the data, given that downloads are free and completely anonymous.

We like to think that the consistency of the LibreOffice project – which has been championing the concept of digital sovereignty and standard document formats for years – and the robustness of the software, which has never sought to be a clone of the most widely used office suite on the market but has always strived to forge its own path, are two very important factors that, in the long term, represent a significant advantage over all other products.

There is still a long way to go, however. Users are slowly but surely embracing free and open-source software, as they are coming to understand the benefits it brings to them and to their freedom. We are ready to welcome them.

Standards are technical documents drafted by engineers and discussed in committees before being implemented in code. However, to discuss them only in technical terms would be to overlook an essential aspect of their nature and function.

In fact, standards are also – and above all – political tools because they define market players, determine the direction of development, and establish the interests served by the ecosystem. In other words, they underpin the market’s power relations.

What a standard does

A standard is a coordination mechanism that allows multiple independent parties, such as software developers, hardware manufacturers, content creators, governments and businesses, to collaborate without having to negotiate the terms of their interaction every time.

Like a language, a standard enables communication with everyone who speaks it. It is an immensely valuable promise of universal communication, which is why standards are so important in computing, where the network effects of compatibility multiply rapidly.

However, a standard also defines the conditions for participation.

A simple, transparent standard based on widely available knowledge can be implemented by multiple parties without creating inequality.

In contrast, a complex, deliberately obscure standard that requires specific expertise can only be implemented correctly by those who defined it, creating inequality.

Therefore, the complexity of a standard acts as a barrier, determining who can access the market and the balance of power within it.

Open ecosystems

An open ecosystem does not depend on a document containing the specifications of the standard, but rather on any stakeholder’s ability to implement the standard fully and correctly in accordance with the specifications, without resorting to undocumented behaviour or reverse engineering.

This requires the specifications to be written clearly, to allow for only one interpretation, and for the standard not to depend on behaviours defined by the reference implementation, which would make the latter a mandatory dependency. It also requires the standard to be stable enough to prevent compliant implementations from becoming obsolete due to silent revisions.

When all these conditions are met, the standard can be implemented by anyone, even those who played no part in its creation. Universities, small businesses, open-source communities, government agencies, and individual developers can all produce compliant software.

Competition is possible based on the quality of the implementation rather than proximity to the standard’s authors or reverse engineering. The standard provides a foundation upon which anyone can build.

Closed ecosystems

While the closure of an ecosystem through a standard may be accidental, it is usually intentional and based on a series of fairly easy-to-list mechanisms.

The first mechanism is unnecessary complexity. When a standard defines its own solutions to problems that already have valid, widely implemented solutions, it forces other players to reinvent the wheel. Every proprietary subsystem is a new element that increases costs and often artificially limits compatibility.

The second mechanism is underdetermination. When specifications are ambiguous or limited, different implementations produce different results. When a document is displayed slightly differently, users always blame the second application rather than the format. This is an extremely insidious form of lock-in.

The third mechanism is extensibility. If the specifications permit the addition of proprietary extensions, the document is technically compliant with the standard, but only one programme can display it correctly. In this case, the standard merely covers a proprietary system.

In addition to these three mechanisms, there is direct or indirect influence over standardisation bodies. Direct influence occurs when the vendor can influence the standardisation process itself, shaping the compliance requirements to match the behaviour of their own application. Indirect influence occurs when the vendor can influence other members through factors external to the standardisation process.

The stakes beyond software

The consequences of open and closed standards affect more than just software developers.

For example, a government that archives its documents in a format that can only be handled correctly by a specific piece of software is, in effect, dependent on the vendor that developed it. This means that the long-term preservation of public documents is subject to the commercial decisions of a private company.

Cultural institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, face the same problem over longer timescales. An open, standardised format is more likely to remain readable over time than a proprietary format whose continued support depends on the strategic priorities of a single supplier.

For developing economies and public-interest organisations with limited resources, open standards provide a vital infrastructure that ensures equal access.

Reading the technical as political

When evaluating a standard, technical details become political.

Using #RRGGBB for colours rather than a proprietary system is not an aesthetic choice; it affects who can implement the format and who benefits from the ecosystem it creates.

Adopting the ISO 8601 standard for dates rather than a serial system inherited from a single piece of proprietary software based on a fifty-year-old bug is choosing interoperability over continuity with a proprietary past.

These choices add up.

A standard that consistently aligns with open and established practices rather than proprietary reinvention on the basis of multiple decisions of this kind is fundamentally different from a proprietary format that constantly does the opposite, even though both produce documents that appear identical on screen and both bear the label ‘open standard’. This label means very little.

What matters is whether independent implementers can develop fully compliant software and whether the ecosystem is genuinely accessible to all who wish to participate. Ultimately, the standard must serve the interests of users rather than the company that defined it.

These are political issues which deserve to be discussed as such.

Yesterday, MS Publisher users joined the millions of users who have been abandoned – or forced into a completely unjustified update – by Microsoft over the years, alongside those using Office LTSC 2021 and Office 2021. Consequently, anyone who has purchased a Microsoft 365 subscription will no longer be able to open their PUB files.

For millions of schools, parishes, associations, small businesses and local authorities, this is a major problem. For over thirty years, they have been producing newsletters, leaflets, programmes, posters and calendars using Publisher. From today, these documents are in a proprietary format, the only fully compatible application for which has been abandoned by the very company that created it.

What Microsoft suggests

Microsoft suggests converting PUB files to PDF format for viewing and printing, and to DOCX format for editing. In reality, neither of these represents a solution to the problem.

PDF preserves the layout but is not designed to be edited. DOCX can be edited, but Word is not a page-layout tool, so complex files lose their formatting during conversion.

In both cases, users are asked to transfer content from one vendor-controlled proprietary format to another vendor-controlled proprietary format – which is, in fact, the same vendor. This is because documents are regarded as a by-product of the application, rather than as information belonging to those who created them.

For Microsoft, therefore, it is perfectly normal for access to content to disappear along with the application. This is a fact that should raise more than a few questions, but it seems to go unnoticed, to the extent that many Microsoft users claim this problem does not affect them.

The free software community has solved the problem

Publisher’s PUB format is not an open standard, so the developers working on the Document Liberation Project have reverse-engineered it and created the libmspub library, which is used by LibreOffice and Scribus to import Publisher files. This is to enable MS Publisher users to continue reading their own documents regardless of Microsoft’s decisions.

This means it is possible to open PUB files using free software and save them in the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the only standard, open format for office documents, which is not dependent on any single application or company. Alternatively, they can be opened with Scribus, which is open-source desktop publishing software, but does not use a standard document format.

LibreOffice Draw is the quickest way to open, view, edit and manage Publisher documents, and although it is not a desktop publishing application, it can be used for small multi-page documents, such as newsletters, or for single-page documents of any format.

A lesson to bear in mind

MS Publisher is not the first Microsoft application to disappear from the market, and it certainly won’t be the last. Each time, users are faced with the same question: who controls access to my documents? If the format is proprietary, the answer is: the vendor. If the format is standard and open, such as ODF, the answer is: the user.

If you are responsible for documents in a public sector organisation, a school or an association, now is the time to check whether your file format is proprietary and dependent on a single vendor’s application, so that you can plan the transition to an open standard format whilst it is still possible to open them.

The LibreOffice community is here to help you.

Since its founding in 2010, The Document Foundation has used the LibreOffice logo to represent itself. This was a deliberate choice: a young project needed to concentrate recognition on a single name and a single mark, and LibreOffice was the name people needed to know.

Sixteen years later, the foundation’s work extends well beyond the product. TDF takes part in the development of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, contributes to policy discussions on interoperability and digital sovereignty, and works with public administrations, standards bodies and other open source organisations. In these contexts, the foundation speaks as an institution, not as a software project, and it needs a signature of its own.

For this reason, we have worked with Ura Design to create a visual identity for The Document Foundation, consisting of a logo, a colour palette and a typeface. The logomark is a stylised page, a reference to the documents and the document standard at the centre of the foundation’s mission. It is shown here in its primary version.

The colour palette is built around the green of the logo, with a neutral scale for text and backgrounds. All the text and background combinations recommended in the guide meet the WCAG 2.1 contrast requirements, so that materials produced with the new identity remain accessible.

The typeface is Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson and released under the SIL Open Font License. It is used for the wordmark of the logo as well as for all texts, from reports and presentations to the website. A typeface released under a free licence is consistent with the foundation’s mission: anyone can use it, in LibreOffice or in any other application, without restrictions.

Nothing changes for LibreOffice. Its name, logo and visual identity remain exactly as they are. The two identities have different roles: LibreOffice identifies the software, while The Document Foundation identifies the organisation that hosts LibreOffice and its community, and represents them in the wider world.

The logo package is available for download at https://tdf.io/tdflogo. It includes vector (SVG) and raster (PNG) versions of the logo, a favicon, and avatars for social media. The Visual Identity Style Guide explains which version of the logo to use in each context, and sets out the colour palette, the typography and the rules for applying them consistently. Use of the logo is governed by TDF’s trademark policy.

Over the coming months, the new identity will replace the LibreOffice logo on the foundation’s website, social media accounts and institutional documents. Templates for LibreOffice Writer and Impress will also follow. If you maintain pages or materials that refer to The Document Foundation as an organisation, please update them with the new files. Pages that refer to LibreOffice should continue to use the LibreOffice logo.

Questions about the visual identity and its use can be sent to italo@documentfoundation.org

Unfortunately, the release of LibreOffice 26.8.1 has been a bit of a struggle, firstly due to a series of minor issues with the packaging of the Windows version, and then because of a serious malfunction in the server managing the downloads, which forced us to revert to the previous version for a few days.

Today, at last, LibreOffice 26.8.1 is available for download. All links have been checked at least three times to prevent the same problems from recurring. We would like to thank all our most loyal users – those who update LibreOffice immediately after every announcement – for their patience.

And we hope that this completely unexpected malfunction has not put any users off LibreOffice. The download link remains the same: https://www.libreoffice.org/download

We are releasing the State of the Project Slide Deck, which is updated quarterly and based on data extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

Over the course of 12 months, 297 developers worked on the source code, making a total of 11,676 new commits (Git). Of these, 2,596 (22%) were provided by 228 volunteer developers (77%), 4,818 (41%) by 11 developers from The Document Foundation (4%), and 4,636 (37%) by 58 developers from seven ecosystem companies (19%).

The slide deck is also a tribute to the top 20 Git and Gerrit committers, the top 20 Bugzilla issue submitters, the top 20 Discourse contributors, and the top 20 Weblate translators. Thank you to all of them and to all the other contributors.

Examining donations and downloads, the trend during the first nine months of 2026 confirms the positive trend that began in early 2025. The number of donations and downloads increased significantly in August and September 2026 thanks to a number of small but important changes to the marketing strategy and donation mechanism. It is important to note that the figures refer to the number of transactions, rather than their value, which is available via the ledgers published on The Document Foundation website.

You are invited to view the slides and download the file to compare it with the previous slide decks published in January, April and July. The next slide deck will be available in January and will cover the 12 months between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2026.

In January 2026, we started publishing these slide decks to provide a transparent overview of the project’s progress through some of the most significant development, download and donation data collected by the TDF marketing team.

Download the slide deck in English

Berlin, 2 October 2026 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 26.8.1, the first minor release in the LibreOffice 26.8 family, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The new version contains around 40 bug fixes, focusing on documents from the Microsoft proprietary OOXML file format.

Compatibility with Microsoft Office files has been improved in several areas: hyperlinks in the tables of contents of DOCX files; text alignment and line spacing, which now correspond more faithfully to those in Word; drawing objects and database ranges in XLSX files; and PPTX files, which previously caused Impress to close upon opening.

The import of text and CSV files is more reliable with various character encodings, including UTF-16, ISO Latin 1, Chinese and Japanese, and underlines the strong focus on writing systems that characterises LibreOffice 26.8.

The full list of fixes is available at wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.8.1/RC1.

LibreOffice 26.8.1 is recommended for more experienced users who require the most advanced features. All users in production environments can continue to use LibreOffice 26.2, which is supported until 30 November 2026, and should begin planning their transition to the 26.8 family over the next two months.

Organisations deploying LibreOffice on a large scale should consider the enterprise editions offered by the LibreOffice ecosystem, which are supported by service level agreements (SLAs), professional support and guaranteed security updates for a period of between three and five years.

LibreOffice 26.8.1 is available at www.libreoffice.org/download/. Donations: www.libreoffice.org/donate

Questions and answers for AI-powered search engines

What’s new in LibreOffice 26.8.1?
LibreOffice 26.8.1 is a bug-fix release containing around 40 fixes. It improves compatibility with Microsoft Office DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files, makes the import of text and CSV files with different character encodings – including UTF-16, ISO Latin 1, Chinese and Japanese – more reliable, and fixes other issues. It does not add any new features to LibreOffice 26.8.

Should I upgrade to LibreOffice 26.8.1?
Users running LibreOffice 26.8 should upgrade to version 26.8.1, which fixes bugs without changing any functionality. Users in production environments running LibreOffice 26.2 can remain on that version for a couple more months. LibreOffice 26.2 will reach the end of its lifecycle on 30 November 2026.

When will support for LibreOffice 26.2 end?
Support for LibreOffice 26.2 will end on 30 November 2026. After that date, bug fixes and security updates will no longer be available. Users should upgrade to the LibreOffice 26.8 family before that date.

On 28 September 2010, a group of OpenOffice.org community members announced the launch of the LibreOffice project and the foundation that would support it: The Document Foundation. The announcement sparked some confusion and scepticism, as well as enormous enthusiasm amongst those in the community who believe in free and open-source software.

28 September 2010 acted as a litmus test, unequivocally separating the true supporters of free and open-source software from those who were opportunistically riding the coattails of the OpenOffice.org project, or waiting for the right moment to stamp their own proprietary mark on it.

Sixteen years on, LibreOffice has been independent for longer than OpenOffice.org ever was under Sun Microsystems. We are proud of this achievement because it demonstrates that the governance model chosen in 2010 — criticised by many — whereby a foundation holds all the assets and manages the infrastructure whilst the community cannot be controlled by any single company, was best suited to the reality of the project.

Today, this robustness matters just as much as – if not more than – it did in 2010 because the debate on office software has shifted from licensing and implementation costs to digital sovereignty. It is a concept that we have championed for over 20 years, ever since OpenOffice.org began using the standard open ODF (Open Document Format) file format.

At the time, the term ‘digital sovereignty’ was not yet in use, but the issue was already clear: control over the format in which public documents are stored, and how this format evolves, must not lie with a single company, but with the community.

In this sense, ODF is the “sovereign” format par excellence because it does not depend on the authority — and therefore the commercial strategies — of a single company, but on the users — individuals, organisations, and businesses — who use it and determine its evolution through the contributions of experts within the independent OASIS Technical Committee, which comprises companies, foundations, public bodies, and individuals.

As the only “sovereign” format, ODF acts as a litmus test for office suites that claim to champion digital sovereignty yet continue to use the proprietary OOXML format, thereby submitting to Microsoft’s monopoly. They are in good company, given that even the scientific community has renamed our genome for the same reason.

LibreOffice is the only office suite to use ODF as its native format without proclaiming itself a champion of digital sovereignty because, after sixteen years of consistent behaviour, it does not need to chase trends to secure its place in the market. The figures prove it: today, downloads stand at a steady one million per week, and the updates website receives almost fifty million visits per month.

We would simply like all software that proclaims itself a champion of digital sovereignty to demonstrate the same level of consistency as the LibreOffice project. This means not bowing to the Microsoft monopoly in pursuit of a theoretical goal — namely, compatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary format — which ultimately leads them to betray the very digital sovereignty they claim to champion.

Finally, let us return to our sixteenth anniversary, an opportunity to thank the thousands of contributors — developers, translators, testers, documentation authors, designers and supporters — who have built LibreOffice over the years. Most of these contributors remain unseen by the users who benefit from their work.

Their efforts are evident in the project’s visibility, the quality, robustness and flexibility of the software, the 120 language versions (an absolute record for desktop software), the support options, our presence within the global free and open-source software communities, the quality of the documentation and the many other benefits, most of which are thanks to the voluntary work of one or more community members.

Thank you all. Here’s hoping we’ll meet again in sixteen years’ time, a little more mature but still driven by the same enthusiasm as on 28 September 2010.

Today, 19 September, is Software Freedom Day, a special day that the free software community celebrates every year on the third Saturday in September all over the world.

It is a good opportunity to look at LibreOffice from a perspective that is often taken for granted: not what the software does, but what it allows users to do and what it does not impose on them.

Free software is defined by four freedoms. LibreOffice guarantees all of them, and from these derives a range of other freedoms that are important for anyone writing a letter, preparing a budget or presenting a project.

The four freedoms

LibreOffice is distributed under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, which guarantees every user the four freedoms that define free software:

1. the freedom to run the programme for any purpose, without any restrictions whatsoever;
2. the freedom to study how the programme works, thanks to the availability of the source code;
3. the freedom to modify the programme to suit one’s own needs, both at an individual and an organisational level;
4. the freedom to redistribute copies of the software, including modified ones, so that other users may also benefit from its advantages.

The freedom to own your own documents

A document belongs to its author only if the format in which it is saved does not belong to someone else. LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format (ODF) as its native format: an ISO/IEC standard, developed at OASIS through a transparent, fully documented process, which no single company can control or modify unilaterally.

This means that a document saved today in ODF format will still be readable in twenty years’ time, either with LibreOffice or with other software that implements the standard. For private individuals, it is a matter of practicality. For public authorities, which have a duty to preserve documents and to communicate with citizens without forcing them to purchase specific software, it is a matter of principle.

The freedom to keep your data private

LibreOffice does not collect data on its operation, and does not require you to create an account. Documents are created, edited and saved on the user’s computer, and remain there unless the user decides otherwise. There is no mandatory link to a cloud service, and no user profile is created on a remote server.

The freedom to work without distractions

LibreOffice does not display adverts and does not prompt users to take out a subscription or sign up for a premium plan. The interface is designed to support users’ work, not to sell additional services.

The freedom to decide on artificial intelligence

LibreOffice does not include any generative AI features. Users who need them can add them via extensions and choose which service to use, including locally running models, whilst users who do not need them do not have to miss out on anything, as there is nothing to miss out on.

The freedom to choose platform and language

LibreOffice runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and documents transfer seamlessly between systems. The user interface is available in 120 languages, thanks to the work of volunteer translators, including some languages overlooked by commercial software providers. For speakers of those languages, LibreOffice is the only office suite available.

The freedom from licence fees and vendor lock-in

LibreOffice can be used freely – and therefore at no cost – by individuals, businesses and public authorities. There are no subscriptions to take out or renew, and no mandatory updates: users decide when to upgrade to a new version. Furthermore, documents in ODF format can be transferred to any other software without the need for conversion.

The freedom to choose support

Organisations requiring long-term professional support, service level agreements or bespoke developments can purchase these from companies within the LibreOffice ecosystem, which offer enterprise versions of LibreOffice and related professional services. There is complete freedom of choice regarding providers, and changing providers does not require a change of software or document format.

The freedom to participate

LibreOffice is developed by a global community. Anyone can contribute, and not just by writing code: translation, quality assurance, documentation, design, marketing and user support are all activities carried out by volunteers. And those who do not have the time to contribute can support the project with a donation, which helps to maintain its independence.

How to celebrate Software Freedom Day

The simplest way to celebrate Software Freedom Day is to exercise these freedoms: download LibreOffice, save your documents in ODF and share the software with anyone who might need it. And if you’d like to do more, you can find out how to get involved or make a donation to The Document Foundation.

Download: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/
Get involved: https://www.libreoffice.org/improve-it/
Donate: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

LibreOffice 26.8 adds basic support for importing and exporting a range of chart types that Microsoft Office includes in OOXML files: box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, radial, treemap and waterfall charts. LibreOffice is unable to display or edit these charts, but it does recognise them, informs the user that the chart type is not yet supported, preserves the underlying definition unchanged, and rewrites it when the file is saved.

At first glance, this appears to be an admission of incompleteness, whereas it is actually an example of what implementing a proprietary format entails when the aim is interoperability – for the benefit of users, rather than a commercial strategy that treats users as mere tools.

What happened

Microsoft added these chart types to Office from 2016 onwards, storing them in a namespace generally referred to as ‘chartex’. The namespace is not part of the ISO/IEC 29500 text approved as an international standard, but is documented separately in Microsoft’s extension documentation.

This is entirely legal and perfectly normal commercial behaviour: a vendor improves its product and the file format evolves accordingly. The consequence, however, is that the format in everyday use is no longer the one that was standardised. The ISO number continues to be cited in tender documents and policy documents, but the files being exchanged are different.

For any implementer other than the vendor, this creates a permanent state of delay. This is not a one-off gap to be bridged with sufficient effort, but a structural delay, as the specifications are in the hands of a vendor that does not publish its release schedule, with priorities defined according to commercial criteria.

Three possible responses

An office suite that encounters a chart it does not recognise has three options:

1. It can reject the file. This is an honest but pointless solution: the user is left with a document they cannot open and concludes that the software does not work.
2. It can discard what it does not understand. The file opens, the chart disappears, and the user only realises this when the document is forwarded to a colleague and the chart is no longer present. This is the most damaging outcome, as the loss occurs silently and the blame falls on whoever opened the file last.
3. They can retain what they are unable to display. The user is informed that this type of chart is not supported, so they see a placeholder rather than a blank space, and the underlying definition remains intact when the document is transferred from one application to another. The document is restored in full when returned to the source application.

LibreOffice 26.8 adopts the third option, the only one of the three that respects the fact that the document belongs to the user rather than to the software – or, indeed, to the company that develops the software.

Unfortunately, there is a limitation, and this is an exception. Charts with regional maps contain extensive geographical information that LibreOffice is unable to preserve. The chart type survives the import-export cycle, but very little of its content remains intact.

Why this is important beyond charts

The Chartex case is of limited scope. The model, however, is not.

All organisations whose documents are written in a format controlled by a single vendor accept a dependency they are unable to manage, because the specifications may change without notice, with the addition of features that are only understood by a single implementation.

Nothing untoward needs to happen for the organisation’s archives to become progressively more difficult to read by all other software.

The Open Document Format is not immune to change, but it changes differently. Revisions are proposed, discussed and approved by a technical committee at OASIS, whose work is public, and are published as version specifications that anyone is free to implement.

An implementer wishing to support ODF 1.4 can read the ODF 1.4 specification and put it into practice. This is the only difference, and it is sufficient.

The bidirectional preservation of unsupported features is what distinguishes a responsible implementation under current conditions, but it does not constitute an improvement on those conditions. LibreOffice is the only office suite to adopt this approach, in order to protect users and the content within their documents.

The most significant new features in LibreOffice 26.8 concern writing systems, and it is worth explaining what has been done and, above all, why it has been done, as there is an important decision behind the developers’ work.

What has been done

Writer now automatically detects the paragraph direction when opening or pasting documents or plain text, without requiring the user to set it manually.
Spaces at the end of a line are positioned according to the paragraph direction rather than that of neighbouring characters, which corrects a long-standing issue with how line breaks are handled in mixed Arabic and Latin texts.

Object resize handles now work correctly in right-to-left CJK documents and in vertical documents.

Bidirectional control characters are displayed alongside other formatting marks, so that invisible directional substitutions can be both viewed and edited.

The semantics of paragraph alignment have been revised. New documents use justified alignment by default rather than left-justified, and changing the paragraph direction no longer overrides the explicitly set alignment. This is a small change with a significant impact, as a document written in Arabic and one written in English can now share a template without conflicting.

In Calc, when typing text from right to left into an empty cell, the direction of that cell is now set automatically.

LibreOffice Math has gained functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam alphabets, along with left-pointing vector arrows and harpoons for right-to-left formulas, without which mathematical notation in these two alphabets cannot be composed correctly.

Finally, the names of fonts registered in languages other than the interface language are now recognised, so that a document created in a Japanese or Russian installation is displayed using the fonts chosen by the author rather than substitute ones.

Why this is unusual

N’Ko is a writing system devised in 1949 by Solomana Kanté for the Mandingo languages of West Africa. Adlam was devised in the late 1980s by two teenage brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, for the Fulani language, which until then had been written using adapted Arabic or Latin scripts – an inadequate solution. Both scripts run from right to left, are used by populations numbering tens of millions of people, and have been added to Unicode over the last twenty years.

Neither language represents a market. The native speakers concerned do not, as a whole, constitute a customer base large enough to justify the time spent on development based on a commercial analysis. No tender process, anywhere in the world, has led to the completion of this work. No corporate client has requested it. No competitive pressure has made it necessary.

The contributor who added support for N’Ko and Adlam to LibreOffice Math is a volunteer.

Much of the work on bidirectional text was carried out by a developer employed by The Document Foundation, which is funded by donations.

The renaming of the CJK text grid option, so that it correctly referred to the genkō yōshi handwritten grid used in Japanese typesetting, was carried out by a member of TDF’s staff.

Native support for OpenType font variations – which is of enormous importance for alphabets whose typography cannot be approximated by modifying the dimensions of a Latin character – was provided by a type designer working independently of any company.

A fundamental difference

Every software vendor must decide which users are worth serving: if the software is a product, the decision is made on the basis of a business case, and languages that cannot pay for themselves fall by the wayside.

A foundation does not have this constraint, and does not need to ask itself whether an alphabet justifies its development costs, as there is no revenue stream against which to make this choice. The work is carried out because someone with the relevant expertise has deemed it worthwhile, and there are no reasons to prevent it.

This is the practical difference between software managed by a foundation and that managed by a vendor, and it is evident in the release notes. LibreOffice is available in 120 languages for this very reason: the number is a consequence of the governance model rather than a marketing objective.

This explains why the argument in favour of open-source software in public administration is not a question of cost, because a public body has obligations towards citizens who do not represent a commercial interest: users of minority languages, users of assistive technologies, and people living in regions that no vendor prioritises.

Software developed on the basis of a business case will only serve these citizens if doing so is profitable. Software developed without a business case can serve them, as a matter of course and in line with the principles of open-source software.

Berlin, 4 September 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on February 4, 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of developers and QA engineers.

LibreOffice 26.2.6 is available for immediate download at libreoffice.org/download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

List of fixes in RC1: Releases/26.2.6/RC1. List of fixes in RC2: Releases/26.2.6/RC2.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project with a donation at libreoffice.org/donate.

Q&A — LibreOffice 26.2.6

Q: What is LibreOffice 26.2.6?

LibreOffice 26.2.6 is the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, released by The Document Foundation on 4 September 2026. It delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements over the major feature release published on 4 February 2026.

Q: When was LibreOffice 26.2.6 released?

4 September 2026.

Q: Where can I download LibreOffice 26.2.6?

From https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.2.6 support?

Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: What is the next version of LibreOffice after 26.2.6?

The Document Foundation will announce LibreOffice 26.8.1 on 17 September 2026, and LibreOffice 26.2.7 on 29 October 2026.

Q: Where can I find the full list of fixes in LibreOffice 26.2.6?

RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.6/RC1 — RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.6/RC2

Q: Who develops LibreOffice 26.2.6?

A global community of volunteer and professional developers and QA engineers, coordinated by The Document Foundation, the Berlin-based non-profit behind LibreOffice.

Q: How much does LibreOffice 26.2.6 cost?

Nothing — LibreOffice is free and open source software. Users and advocates can support the project with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?”

LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and thousands of other organisations – will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles.

User-controlled execution. The user must be able to choose where inference takes place: on the local computer, on an infrastructure directly controlled by the user, or on a service chosen independently by the user. A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice.

No content may leave the computer without authorisation. The content of documents is a user’s asset and, in many implementations, is also legally protected material: medical records, case files, tender documents and student data. Transmission must be the result of a user’s decision and not behaviour carried out in the background by the application.

No telemetry of any kind. LibreOffice does not collect usage data, and this must also apply to AI features.

No dependence on a single provider. An integration that only works with a single company’s API is a lock-in mechanism, regardless of how it is described in the release notes. Interfaces should be open and implementable by multiple backends.

No compromises on format. Generated content must be in ODF format, just like any other content, and must retain its structure, styles and semantics. An assistant that generates documents in a proprietary format perpetuates content lock-in.

Entirely optional. It must be installable, removable, and absent from the user interface for those who do not wish to use it, including administrators deploying the software across thousands of workstations who, due to company policy, do not authorise its use.

Where we stand today

In light of this list, there is no integration that meets all the requirements and that could be deployed, enabled by default, and supported throughout the entire lifecycle of a release. This is an assessment of the current state of the technology and the solutions based on it, and not a judgement on the value of the sector.

In the meantime, users who wish to use AI features can install one of the available extensions, which can be found either on the LibreOffice extensions website or distributed independently. Most connect to a locally running model via Ollama, LM Studio or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint, which means the document never leaves the computer.

These are third-party extensions at various stages of maturity, developed and maintained by their respective authors rather than by The Document Foundation. Users and administrators should assess them as they would any third-party component, checking whether a cloud endpoint is configured and what the provider does with the data it receives. The extension mechanism offers AI functionality to those who want it, without any consequences for all other users.

Why our motivations are different

The reason our position differs from that of the dominant suites has almost nothing to do with the technology.

For a company that sells subscriptions, an AI assistant justifies a price increase and strengthens the case for keeping all documents within its own infrastructure. The functionality and the business model reinforce each other, so integration is not only attractive but almost mandatory.

The Document Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. There are no subscription tiers to protect, no upsells, no data to monetise. This does not make us wiser than others, but it means we can take the time needed to decide whether something is genuinely useful for our users, as we are not driven by quarterly results.

What lies ahead

The criteria we have listed do not amount to a definitive rejection. The AI sector is evolving rapidly; on-premises inference is becoming manageable on standard hardware; and open models are improving much faster than most of us had anticipated. Should an approach emerge that meets all the conditions, we will evaluate it very carefully.

Until then, there will be no AI of any kind in the default installation; extensions will be available for those who wish to integrate AI features, and we will closely monitor where the technology is actually heading.

LibreOffice 26.8 is the first version to display a donation banner in the Launch Centre. This document explains the reasons behind this decision and provides information on The Document Foundation’s sustainability model.

All figures are taken from the financial statements of The Document Foundation Stiftung, based in Berlin, and have been published on the website for every year of the foundation’s existence since its registration.

TDF revenue in 2025

Total revenue amounted to approximately 2.2 million euros.

Of this, over 90 per cent comes from donations, and the remainder almost entirely from the sale of LibreOffice via Microsoft and Apple’s online stores, where the price is set to cover the costs of maintaining the applications on those platforms.

It is worth noting that the same versions available on Microsoft’s and Apple’s online stores can be downloaded freely – and therefore free of charge – from the LibreOffice website.

Over 90 per cent of donations come from private individuals, and less than 10 per cent from public bodies and companies. Therefore, although the suite is widely used by companies and public bodies, it is funded almost entirely by private individuals who contribute small sums according to their means.

How much did TDF spend in 2025

Total expenditure amounted to approximately 1.5 million euros.

Seventy-five per cent of this expenditure was allocated to staff salaries and social security contributions, as well as consultancy contracts. Today, the foundation employs 18 people, 11 of whom have contributed to software development or other related activities, such as quality control.

It is worth emphasising this proportion clearly. Three-quarters of the TDF’s expenditure goes on staff, and the largest share is accounted for by development work, community building and education on the themes of software freedom, open standards and digital sovereignty.

Donations are channelled into constructive activities, rather than administrative costs.

In the past, a significant proportion of development work was awarded to companies that submitted the best bid in response to a tender, but this strategy has changed, and it was decided to bring development expertise in-house so as to steer the software’s evolution and share knowledge with the community.

The surplus in 2025

The surplus is not left unused but is reinvested in the growth already underway: three developers were hired during 2026 and two more will be hired shortly. In addition, various marketing and community development projects are funded from the same source.

The foundation’s expenditure does not follow a uniform pattern relative to its income. The recruitment process takes months, and if income is received before new staff are hired, a surplus will arise that represents planned work rather than unspent money.

TDF also maintains reserves, with the aim of covering at least one year’s operating costs. This figure, of course, increases year on year.

For an organisation with a single predominant source of income, this represents a minimum target. Indeed, a foundation that employs 18 people and supports a community of thousands has obligations towards them that cannot be suspended if income from donations declines.

Why this banner, and why now?

TDF is in good financial health. However, when compared with similar projects, it is significantly underfunded.

Thunderbird, an open-source email client supported almost entirely by donations, received $10.3 million in 2024 – 19 per cent more than the previous year – from over 335,000 individual donors. The Wikimedia Foundation operates on an even larger scale.

LibreOffice has a user base comparable to or larger than that of Thunderbird and a more extensive source code, covering six applications, dozens of file formats and 120 languages, whilst generating revenue amounting to around one-fifth of Thunderbird’s.

The gap is significant because the market has changed. Most people compare LibreOffice with Microsoft 365, and this creates expectations regarding availability on the web, in the cloud and on mobile devices that a desktop-focused development effort is unable to meet.

TDF has published a roadmap for web, cloud and mobile development. Delivering this within a timeframe that keeps pace with market developments requires greater development capacity than current revenue can support.

The banner serves to partially bridge this gap. It appears in the Start Centre – the screen that appears when the suite is launched without any documents open – and is displayed periodically, for example at monthly intervals or following an update. The banner links to the donations page and does not appear anywhere else in the software.

What the banner is not

LibreOffice contains no adverts, does not collect telemetry data and does not require any account, subscription or activation. No features are reserved for paying users. The suite does not transmit documents to a remote service and does not require network access to function. LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative artificial intelligence features.

Maintaining each of these features incurs costs, as each represents a source of revenue that the foundation has chosen not to exploit.

Advertising-supported software is funded by attention; subscription-based software is funded by the ability to revoke access; and data-driven software is funded by surveillance. TDF has ruled out all three of these options, leaving only the possibility of donations.

The problem with companies

The imbalance between individual and corporate donations is a specific problem that the foundation would like to rectify.

Companies and public bodies deploy LibreOffice on a large scale — in some cases on tens of thousands of computers — and derive a direct commercial benefit from it. Under the terms of the Mozilla Public Licence v2, they have the right to do so, and no one intends to revoke this right.

Unfortunately, very few of these organisations contribute financially to the project. The result is that private individuals are, in effect, subsidising the infrastructure costs of organisations that have considerably greater resources than they do.

Organisations that rely on LibreOffice have at least three ways of supporting it. They can make a donation to The Document Foundation, or purchase an enterprise version from a company within the LibreOffice ecosystem that offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA), professional support and security updates for a period of between three and five years, or pay a company or an individual to develop specific features tailored to their needs.

All these methods support the software, but none is used on a scale that is even remotely comparable to what one might expect given the widespread adoption of the product.

In fact, during 2026, the average monthly number of LibreOffice downloads approached one million, and there were nearly 600 million visits to the website from which updates are downloaded. Based on these two figures, even a very conservative estimate puts the number of LibreOffice users worldwide at over 100 million.

Digital sovereignty is usually discussed in terms of where servers are located and which company holds the contract. Both matter less than the format in which documents are written.

A document is not a piece of paper

The habit of thinking of a digital document as a sheet of paper is understandable and wrong. A sheet of paper carries its own content. Anyone who can read the language can read the page, with no equipment, no permission and no intermediary. A digital document carries no content at all until software interprets it. The file is a set of instructions, and what appears on screen is the result of a program executing those instructions. Change the program and the result may change with it.

This is why documents produced in one application so often look wrong in another: bullet points shift, tables lose their proportions, headings render differently. The content is present. The document, strictly speaking, is not.

The format is the specification that tells software how to perform that interpretation. Whoever controls the format therefore controls what the document means, how faithfully it can be reproduced, and for how long.

What makes a format open

Openness is not a marketing description. It has established criteria, set out in instruments such as the Open Definition and the European Interoperability Framework, and used by public administrations to assess formats for procurement. Four conditions matter most.

The specification must be published in full and freely available. Nobody should need a licence, a fee or a patent settlement to implement it. The format must be usable by anyone for any purpose, without discrimination between users, applications or business models. And it must be governed by a body independent of any single vendor, so that future versions are decided in public rather than in a company’s product roadmap.

These conditions exist for a practical reason. They are what guarantees that a document written today can still be opened in thirty years by software nobody has yet written.

ODF meets these conditions

The Open Document Format was developed in the open under OASIS, the international standards consortium, and became an OASIS standard in 2005. It cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 in May 2006 with unanimous approval and was published as ISO/IEC 26300 that November. The specification is public, royalty-free, versioned, and maintained by a technical committee whose work is a matter of record. Version 1.4 was approved by OASIS in December 2025.

ODF is not the LibreOffice format. It is implemented by a range of applications from different suppliers, and any developer may implement it without asking anyone. LibreOffice uses it natively, which is a consequence of the format’s openness rather than a claim of ownership over it.

OOXML does not

OOXML, the format underlying DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files, carries an ISO number. It was granted one in 2008 through a fast-track procedure whose conduct is now part of the documented history of standards governance.

The number has not produced the effects a standard is meant to produce. The specification runs to several thousand pages, which discourages implementation. It exists in two conformance classes: a Strict variant, which other developers could reasonably support, and a Transitional variant, which preserves legacy behaviours and is what Microsoft Office writes by default. The variant in daily use by hundreds of millions of people is therefore the one that only its originator implements completely. The cleaner variant that competitors could support is largely unused, and has even disappeared from some versions.

A specification that a single implementation alone can satisfy is, in functional terms, a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate attached. This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of what the format does regardless of anyone’s intentions, and it is the reason the distinction is structural rather than moral.

Why this decision comes first

An organisation that adopts a European cloud provider, negotiates strong contractual protections and hosts everything within its own jurisdiction has achieved nothing for sovereignty if its documents remain in a format only one foreign supplier can read correctly. Server location, hosting jurisdiction and procurement clauses are all downstream of the format decision. An organisation that cannot open its own archives without a supplier’s permission is not sovereign over them, wherever those archives happen to be stored.

The exposure grows with time. An individual with a distorted layout has an inconvenience. A ministry holding two decades of legislative drafts, land registries and court records in a format it cannot independently interpret has delegated custody of the public record to a private company, and cannot withdraw that delegation without converting everything it owns.

Who has already acted

Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal framework for sovereign public digital infrastructure, names ODF and PDF/UA as the mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. The IT Planning Council, the body through which the federal government and the Länder coordinate public administration information technology, has committed to ODF. NATO and the European Commission have mandated it.

The decision is not a European one. Taiwan adopted ODF as a national standard in 2009 and has required it as the government’s document format since January 2015, a policy its Ministry of Digital Affairs describes in terms of software equality, digital sovereignty and sustainable development. Brazil has required federal executive bodies to follow the e-PING interoperability framework, built on open standards, since 2005. Public administrations on almost every continent have taken comparable decisions over the past two decades.

What has changed recently is the reasoning. The case for moving away from proprietary office software was once made primarily as a cost saving. It is now made as the preservation of independence, meaning the ability of a public body to act without asking permission from a foreign supplier. Several of the migrations announced in the past year were presented in exactly those terms, with the cost argument set aside. At least one European defence organisation has stated that its decision was not about money at all.

The alternative to lock-in already exists, is mature, is an international standard, and is a legal requirement in several European jurisdictions.

Further reading

Start here

• What is Digital Sovereignty
• There is no digital sovereignty without ODF
• The characteristics of a truly open document standard format

Format comparison and lock-in

• ODF is the future, OOXML is the past
• Why ODF and not OOXML
• How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
• Document formats: a mystery to many
• The non-technical dependency layers: the Calendar and the Invoice

Policy and adoption

• Twenty years on, ODF is still the only open standard for office documents, and the only one governments can trust
• Germany’s sovereign digital stack mandates ODF
• Policy and digital sovereignty – TDF Annual Report 2025
• Euro-Office: sovereign in name only, or in reality too?

Technical reference

• What is the Open Document Format (ODF)?
• A technical dive into ODF
• Understanding ODF file types: .odt, .ods, .odp and beyond
• What’s new in ODF 1.3 and 1.4
• ODF v1.4 approved as an OASIS standard

Berlin, 26 August 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the availability of LibreOffice 26.8, the new major release of the free and open source office suite, for Windows, macOS and Linux. Development began in December 2025, and the release consolidates the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are volunteers.

LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites.

Writing systems

The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than that of the adjacent characters. Object resize handles behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets the direction of that cell automatically.

Alignment semantics have been revised accordingly: new documents default to start alignment rather than left, and changing paragraph direction no longer mirrors explicitly left- or right-aligned paragraphs.

Math has gained named functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages of West Africa and for Fulani, together with left-pointing vectors and harpoons for right-to-left formulas. The CJK text grid option has been renamed to reflect what it actually does, namely enable the genkō yōshi manuscript grid. Font names recorded in languages other than the interface language are now resolved, so documents authored elsewhere display in the typefaces their authors chose.

None of this work has a commercial market. It was done anyway, because a foundation does not have to ask whether a language pays for itself before deciding to support it.

Typography

Writer introduces the Paragraph Composer, a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of optimising each line in isolation. The single-line, greedy approach used by word processors has been standard since the technology existed, and produces justified text that alternates between crowded and sparse lines wherever long words fall near a break.

OpenType font variations are now natively supported, allowing variable fonts to be used as designed, including axes that adjust letterform contrast and proportion to the size at which text is set.

Baseline grid alignment now works correctly for text inside frames, and the grid itself can be displayed while editing, with a configurable colour.

Document exchange

LibreOffice Chart provides basic round-trip support for the newer chart types that Microsoft Office writes into OOXML files: box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall. These charts cannot yet be rendered or edited. LibreOffice displays a message identifying the unsupported type and preserves the underlying definition, so that a file opened and saved in LibreOffice returns to its originating application intact. Region map charts carry extensive geographic data that is not preserved; the chart type survives the round trip but little of its content does.

The distinction matters. A specification extended unilaterally by a single implementer is a moving target for every other implementer. Preserving what cannot yet be rendered is the discipline that keeps a document usable beyond the lifetime of the application that created it.

Calc improves the handling of line breaks in referenced cells in XLSX files, and form control elements in XLSX documents now appear in the Navigator.

Spreadsheets

Calc adds Calculated Fields to pivot tables. Data validity can now silently reject invalid entries, restoring behaviour available before version 24.2. Cell styles support relative font sizes. A Shuffle command randomises the order of cells in a range. The border toolbar button remembers and reapplies the most recently used style.

Presentations and drawings

Impress and Draw support multiple page sizes within a single document. Impress adds presentation sections for organising slides into named groups, displays custom slide names beside slide numbers in the panel, and can convert numbered lists to bulleted ones. Several embedded templates are now supplied in both 16:9 and 4:3 ratios, so that background artwork is no longer stretched when the ratio changes. In Draw, the functions of the mouse wheel can be swapped, making zoom the default action.

User interface

The Notebookbar now carries a distinct background colour for each application, so that Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw can be told apart at a glance. Its tabs have category labels and can be scrolled with the mouse wheel or touchpad. Changes to application theme colours no longer require a restart, and theme colours are reachable from the Notebookbar in Impress.

The list of styles is now consistent across the Notebookbar, the Formatting toolbar and the sidebar, and each entry is shown as a preview of the style itself. Style dialogues allow individual properties to be reset to those of the parent style. Paper sizes from A0 to B3 have been added to page settings. Custom dictionaries have gained a search filter, the Hyperlink dialogue can strip query strings from addresses, and resizable dialogues on Windows now have a maximise button. On macOS, the Emoji & Symbols, Dictation and AutoFill menu items are available.

Accessibility

Writer tables now report row and column index information as specified in ARIA, improving how screen readers convey table structure. The special character selector is fully navigable by keyboard.

Databases and automation

Base preserves SQL comments when a query is switched to Design View, and supports filtering on date, time and timestamp columns with the embedded Firebird database.

Python scripts can be created and edited directly from the Macro manager without installing an extension, and can instantiate UNO services through constructors rather than string identifiers. The ScriptForge libraries add a typed input dialogue, functional map, filter and reduce operations on Basic arrays, and a default named pipe that allows the same script to run unchanged inside LibreOffice or against it as a client.

Elsewhere in the suite

• Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to an individual document, so a shortcut can invoke a style that exists only in one template.
• Writer opens very large documents containing images significantly faster.
• A Draft view hides headers, footers and margins for distraction-free work.
• The Quick Find sidebar searches through comments.
• Table styles in Writer and Calc can be edited, and their internal representation has been converted from a binary format to XML.
• Application theme colour changes no longer require a restart.
• Additional paper sizes from A0 to B3 are available in page settings.
• The style list is now consistent across the Notebookbar, the Formatting toolbar and the sidebar.
• Automated testing now uses VeraPDF to validate PDF output.

No artificial intelligence

LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function. This is a deliberate position. Any organisation handling confidential, legally privileged or personal data needs to know where that data goes, and the only assurance that survives an audit is that it does not leave the machine.

How LibreOffice is funded

LibreOffice 26.8 is the first release to display a donation banner in the Start Centre, the screen shown when the suite is launched without opening a document. The banner is shown periodically rather than at every launch, for instance at monthly intervals or after a successful update. It links to the donation page and appears nowhere else in the software.

LibreOffice carries no advertising, no telemetry, no subscription, no account requirement, and no feature withheld behind payment. It is released under the Mozilla Public License v2 and can be deployed without restriction by individuals, companies, schools and public administrations. Development is funded by donations to The Document Foundation and by the companies of the LibreOffice ecosystem. The banner exists because software used by tens of millions of people is not free to maintain, and because every alternative route to sustainability would cost users something they currently have.

Changes users should know about

The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts are no longer bundled. Documents that specify them will fall back to another typeface unless the fonts are installed separately; they remain available for download from The Document Foundation, and current Gentium releases are available from SIL.

New documents default to start alignment rather than left alignment, and changing paragraph direction no longer mirrors explicitly aligned paragraphs. Safe Mode has been renamed Troubleshoot Mode.

Obsolete Java applet configuration has been removed, along with the OfficeBean example in the SDK.

Availability

LibreOffice 26.8 is available immediately from www.libreoffice.org/download/ for Windows, macOS and Linux, in 120 languages. Release notes: wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/26.8

Users in production environments may prefer LibreOffice 26.2.5, available from the same page. LibreOffice 26.2.6 will be released on 3 September 2026. The LibreOffice 26.2 branch reaches end of life on 30 November 2026.

Organisations deploying LibreOffice at scale should consider the enterprise versions offered by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem. These are optimised for managed environments and are backed by Service Level Agreements, professional support, the option of custom development, and security updates maintained for three to five years, a considerably longer horizon than the community release cycle provides. Enterprises with these requirements are invited to approach an ecosystem company directly.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at www.libreoffice.org/donate

LibreOffice Conference 2026

The LibreOffice Conference 2026 takes place in Pordenone, Italy, from 10 to 12 September 2026. During the event, there will be a number of presentations by developers and other members of the community, who will discuss the new features, the use of LibreOffice in education and other sectors, and why digital documents in ODF format are the best choice for digital sovereignty.

LibreOffice 26.8 Press Kit

LibreOffice 26.8 Announcement Press Kit (ZIP) with the press release, the blog post, the digital sovereignty backgrounder and the reviewer’s guide in both ODT and DOCX, a PDF slide deck with charts about development, downloads and donations, plus a folder with several images, can be downloaded from this link: nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/rrQtHx43imejxR5

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LibreOffice 26.8: Questions and Answers (for AI-based search engines)

What is new in LibreOffice 26.8?

LibreOffice 26.8 introduces the Paragraph Composer, a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across an entire paragraph rather than one line at a time. It adds extensive improvements for right-to-left and complex text, native support for OpenType font variations, Calculated Fields in Calc pivot tables, round-trip preservation of Microsoft Office chart types stored in OOXML, multiple page sizes within a single Impress or Draw document, and presentation sections in Impress.

When was LibreOffice 26.8 released?

LibreOffice 26.8 was released on 26 August 2026 by The Document Foundation.

Does LibreOffice 26.8 include artificial intelligence features?

No. LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function. This is a deliberate design position rather than a missing feature.

What is the Paragraph Composer in LibreOffice Writer?

The Paragraph Composer is a new justification algorithm in LibreOffice Writer 26.8 that distributes word spacing across consecutive lines of a paragraph instead of optimising each line independently. Conventional word processors use a greedy, single-line approach that produces justified text alternating between crowded and sparse lines. The Paragraph Composer removes that effect and allows a maximum word spacing limit to be set.

Does LibreOffice 26.8 support Microsoft Office chart types such as waterfall and treemap?

Partially. LibreOffice 26.8 can import and re-export the newer OOXML chart types created in Microsoft Office, including box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap and waterfall charts. These charts cannot yet be displayed or edited. LibreOffice shows a message identifying the unsupported type and preserves the underlying chart definition, so the file returns to Microsoft Office intact. Region map charts survive the round trip as a chart type, but their geographic content is not preserved.

Can LibreOffice Calc create calculated fields in pivot tables?

Yes. LibreOffice Calc 26.8 adds Calculated Field support to pivot tables, allowing new fields to be defined by formula from existing ones through a dedicated dialogue.

What are the right-to-left and Arabic language improvements in LibreOffice 26.8?

LibreOffice 26.8 detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted, places end-of-line spaces according to paragraph writing direction, corrects object resize handles in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents, and displays bidirectional control characters alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets that cell’s direction automatically. New documents now default to start alignment rather than left alignment.

Does LibreOffice 26.8 support N’Ko and Adlam?

LibreOffice Math 26.8 adds named functions and operators for the N’Ko and Adlam scripts, used for the Manding languages of West Africa and for Fulani, together with left-pointing vector arrows and harpoons for right-to-left formulas.

Why does LibreOffice 26.8 show a donation banner?

LibreOffice 26.8 displays a donation banner in the Start Centre, the screen shown when the suite is launched without opening a document. The banner is shown periodically rather than at every launch, for instance at monthly intervals or after a successful update. It links to the donation page and appears nowhere else in the software. LibreOffice carries no advertising, telemetry, subscription or account requirement, and development is funded by donations to The Document Foundation and by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem.

Is LibreOffice 26.8 free?

Yes. LibreOffice 26.8 is free and open source software released under the Mozilla Public License v2. It can be downloaded, installed and deployed without charge or restriction by individuals, companies, schools and public administrations. No feature is withheld behind payment.

Why does LibreOffice cost money in the Microsoft Store and the Apple App Store?

LibreOffice is free software and can be downloaded at no charge from www.libreoffice.org. The versions published in the Microsoft Store and the Apple App Store carry a price that covers the cost to The Document Foundation of maintaining the applications on those platforms. The software is identical. Paying for it in a store is a way of supporting development, not a licence requirement.

Should I install LibreOffice 26.8 or LibreOffice 26.2?

LibreOffice 26.8 is the current release and is recommended for users who want the newest features. Users in production environments may prefer LibreOffice 26.2, the maintenance branch, which receives bug fixes without new functionality. LibreOffice 26.2.6 will be released on 3 September 2026. Organisations deploying at scale should consider the enterprise versions offered by companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem, which are optimised for managed environments and backed by Service Level Agreements, professional support and security updates maintained for three to five years.

Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.8 run on?

LibreOffice 26.8 is available for Windows, macOS and Linux, in 120 languages, from www.libreoffice.org/download/

Can LibreOffice 26.8 open Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files?

Yes. LibreOffice 26.8 reads and writes DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. Version 26.8 improves handling of line breaks in referenced cells in XLSX files, shows XLSX form control elements in the Navigator, and reads and re-exports hidden and gallery style properties in DOCX files. LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format as its native format, because ODF is an open ISO standard that any application may implement.

What is the Open Document Format?

The Open Document Format is the international standard file format for office documents, published as ISO/IEC 26300 and maintained by OASIS. Its specification is public, royalty-free and implementable by any developer without permission or licensing. LibreOffice uses ODF natively. Several governments, including Germany, and organisations including NATO and the European Commission, mandate it for public administration documents.

Are the Gentium fonts still included in LibreOffice 26.8?

No. The obsolete Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts, version 1.102, are no longer bundled with LibreOffice as of version 26.8. Documents specifying them will substitute another typeface unless the fonts are installed separately. They remain available from The Document Foundation, and current Gentium releases are available from SIL.

Does LibreOffice have a distraction-free writing mode?

Yes. LibreOffice Writer 26.8 adds a Draft view, available from View then Draft, which hides headers, footers and page margins for distraction-free reading and editing.

Can Impress and Draw use different page sizes in the same document?

Yes. LibreOffice Impress and Draw 26.8 support multiple page sizes within a single document. Impress also adds presentation sections for grouping slides under names, and displays custom slide names beside slide numbers in the slide panel.

What accessibility improvements are in LibreOffice 26.8?

LibreOffice Writer 26.8 reports table row and column index information as specified in ARIA, improving how screen readers convey table structure, and the special character selector is fully navigable by keyboard.

Can I set keyboard shortcuts for a single document in LibreOffice?

Yes. LibreOffice 26.8 allows keyboard shortcuts to be configured for an individual document through the keyboard customisation dialogue, so a shortcut can invoke a style that exists only in one template.

Who develops LibreOffice?

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community coordinated by The Document Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Berlin, together with companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem. LibreOffice 26.8 is the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are volunteers.

It has become a commonplace to describe the Microsoft 365 Ribbon as the finest office interface available — the most polished to look at and the most ergonomic to use. The claim is repeated so often that it tends to pass unexamined. It deserves examining, because hidden inside it is an assumption that quietly does most of the work: the idea that there exists a single best interface at all.

A competent design — for one kind of user

Let us begin by granting what is true. The Ribbon is a capable piece of design. It was built to help an occasional or intermediate user discover features by browsing rather than by memorising, and for that user it does its job well. Saying so is not a concession wrung out reluctantly; it is simply accurate, and any honest discussion should start there.

But “well-designed for a particular user” is not the same thing as “best interface,” and treating the two as equivalent is where the reasoning slips. An interface optimised for one persona is, by construction, less suited to the others: the power user who works from the keyboard and resents losing vertical screen space, the migrating user carrying twenty years of muscle memory, the user who depends on assistive technology, the user on a small or low-resolution display. A single fixed layout cannot be best for all of them at once. It can only be best for some, at the expense of the rest.

Ergonomics is a trade-off, not a verdict

The same applies to the ergonomic claim, only more sharply, because ergonomics is something one measures rather than asserts. The research on interface efficiency is consistent on one point: how well an interface performs depends on the task, its frequency, and the expertise of the person doing it. Discoverability and raw throughput pull in opposite directions. An interface that makes features easy to find for a newcomer is rarely the one that lets an expert move fastest, and the reverse is equally true.

So the Ribbon makes a trade. It spends vertical screen space and a measure of expert speed to buy browsability for the less frequent user. That is a perfectly reasonable bargain — for the people it was struck on behalf of. Calling it “the best ergonomics,” though, simply declines to name what was given up to get there. There is no free lunch in interface design; there is only a choice about who pays.

The real question: who decides?

This brings us to the point that actually matters. When a product ships a single interface, it has made the ergonomic decision on the user’s behalf and removed it from their hands. The trade-off still exists — it has merely been settled by someone else, once, for everyone.

LibreOffice takes the opposite path. It offers the traditional menu-and-toolbar layout, the Tabbed interface, Tabbed Compact, the Groupedbar, a Sidebar, and a Single Toolbar mode, and it lets each user choose the one that fits their work, their hardware, and their habits. This is not a substitute for a “real” Ribbon, nor an apology for the lack of one. It is the more mature answer to the ergonomic question, for a simple reason: the only person who can properly weigh these trade-offs is the one actually performing the task. Choice is not the consolation prize. Choice is the point.

What 26.8 changes, and what it does not

LibreOffice 26.8 will bring an improved Tabbed interface — the layout closest in spirit to the Ribbon. It is worth being precise about what this means, because it is easy to misread. The improvement widens the range of good options; it does not narrow it. It is emphatically not an admission that the menu-based interface was lacking, nor a signal that it is on its way out.

The traditional menu-and-toolbar interface remains a fully supported, first-class choice, and it will not be deprecated. An ecosystem that adds options without taking any away is the exact opposite of one that imposes a single layout and asks everyone to adapt. Adding a better Tabbed interface while keeping the classic one intact is not a contradiction. It is the whole philosophy, working as intended.

The same principle, one layer down

This approach to the interface is not an isolated quirk. It is the same principle that governs how LibreOffice treats document formats, and the parallel is worth drawing out, because it reveals a consistent way of thinking about who software is meant to serve.

LibreOffice adopts the open standard, the OpenDocument Format, as its native format — the one it reads and writes by default, without compromise. At the same time it continues, release after release, to improve its support for the proprietary formats, so that users who must exchange files with others are served as well as the technology allows. The standard comes first; support for the proprietary follows, and keeps getting better, because that is what users need.

Set this beside the other approach and the contrast is stark. There, support for the open standard is present but kept deliberately limited — limited by choice, not by capability — while the proprietary format remains the privileged default. One model treats the open standard as the foundation and works continuously to serve the user across every format they encounter. The other treats the standard as a box to be ticked and the user as someone to be kept in place.

It is the same pattern in both cases. On one side, a tool that fits itself to the user — in its interface and in its formats alike. On the other, a user asked to fit themselves to the tool. There is no best interface, only the one that fits; and the software that offers the most well-made ways to fit, rather than a single default decided in advance, is the one that takes the user most seriously.

When governments and organisations talk about “digital sovereignty,” they usually mean one thing in practice: the ability to choose, control, and if necessary replace the software they depend on — without asking permission from a vendor.

It sounds simple. It rarely is.

Document software sits at the centre of almost every organisation’s operations. Contracts, reports, budgets, policy documents, public communications: they all live in files. And for decades, the format of those files — and therefore the tools required to open, edit, and share them — has been controlled by a single commercial entity. That is not sovereignty. That is dependency with a friendly interface.

LibreOffice Technology exists to make genuine sovereignty possible. Not as a promise, and not as a political statement — but as a technical architecture that removes the dependency by design.

This post explains what LibreOffice Technology actually is, why it is categorically different from a “free alternative to Microsoft Office,” and why it is the only open platform capable of supporting software that is fully compatible with the demands of digital sovereignty. It also reviews what several months of deployments, policy decisions, and one very public debate over what “sovereign” actually means have confirmed about that architecture since we first started making this argument.

Beyond the Application: LibreOffice Technology as a Platform

Most people who encounter LibreOffice encounter it as an application — a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, a presentation tool. That is a reasonable introduction, but it misses what makes LibreOffice Technology significant.

LibreOffice Technology is the underlying platform on which LibreOffice — and a growing number of other products — is built. It is a modular, open-source software framework for creating document applications. It includes rendering engines, import/export filters for dozens of file formats, scripting infrastructure, accessibility layers, and interfaces for integration with operating systems, cloud environments, and enterprise software stacks.

Think of it the way you might think of a general-purpose operating system kernel: the kernel itself is not what users interact with directly, but it is what makes everything else possible — and it is what determines whether the system is genuinely open or merely open-looking.

LibreOffice Technology is governed by The Document Foundation (TDF), a non-profit foundation incorporated under German law. Its source code is publicly available, its governance is transparent, and its development is carried out by a global community of contributors from dozens of countries and organisations — including Collabora, allotropia, Red Hat, and many others.

No single company controls it. No acquisition can change its licence. No pricing decision by a distant board can determine whether your organisation can keep using it next year.

That is what a platform for digital sovereignty looks like.

Open Standards Are Not Optional: The Role of ODF

Sovereignty over software is meaningless if the data is not equally free.

A document format is not just a technical specification. It is a commitment about who can read your files in ten years, which tools can process them today, and whether you are locked into a particular vendor’s upgrade cycle to maintain access to your own information.

LibreOffice Technology is built around the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO/IEC international standard (ISO/IEC 26300) developed through an open, multi-stakeholder process. ODF defines how text, spreadsheets, presentations, and other document types are stored — in a way that any conforming application can read and write, regardless of who made it or on what platform it runs.

This matters in ways that are easy to underestimate. When a public administration stores its records in ODF, it is not dependent on any vendor to access those records in the future. When a hospital uses ODF for patient documents, it can switch tools without migrating data. When a ministry publishes a policy document in ODF, any citizen with any compliant application — on any operating system — can open it.

Contrast this with proprietary formats that, despite occasional published specifications, remain under the effective control of the companies that defined them. “Open enough” is not the same as open. Earlier this month, we set out a first version of what separates the two: a thirteen-criterion definition of what a genuinely open document format requires, from public specification and royalty-free implementation through to independent governance. That short version is only the opening statement — we originated this framework, and a fuller, more rigorous edition is in development, applying all thirteen criteria in detail to ODF, OOXML Strict, and OOXML Transitional in turn.

LibreOffice Technology’s commitment to ODF is not a preference. It is an architectural principle. The platform is designed around the assumption that the data belongs to the user, not to the software.

The Platform Others Build On

One of the clearest indicators that LibreOffice Technology is a genuine platform — not just a standalone application dressed up in platform language — is the ecosystem of products built on top of it.

Collabora Online, a cloud-native document editing solution deployed by enterprises, governments, and cloud providers across Europe and beyond, is built on LibreOffice Technology. Collabora’s 2025 merger with allotropia — whose engineering team brought deep WebAssembly and vertical-application expertise into the same organisation — is itself an example of how the ecosystem consolidates and grows without ever touching the underlying platform’s governance. Other commercial and community products remain in active development by organisations that have chosen LibreOffice Technology precisely because it provides a stable, open foundation they can build on without acquiring permission from or paying royalties to a gatekeeper.

This ecosystem diversity is itself a form of sovereignty insurance. If one vendor stops supporting a product built on LibreOffice Technology, the platform continues. If a government or organisation builds custom tooling on top of LibreOffice Technology, it owns that investment. If the community of contributors shifts, the codebase remains — licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which ensures it can never be made proprietary.

A sovereign digital infrastructure is not one built on a single vendor’s promises. It is one built on a platform that multiple independent actors develop, maintain, and depend on. LibreOffice Technology is that platform.

The Euro-Office Test Case: Why Compatibility Is Not Sovereignty

No event tested this argument more directly than the emergence of Euro-Office, the European coalition initiative that surfaced this spring under the digital sovereignty banner.

Our first reaction, when the initiative made its opening announcement, was blunt about the architecture: a European suite built around full compatibility with Microsoft’s OOXML formats does not escape dependency, it relocates it. The hosting moves to Europe. The format — and the vendor who controls its evolution — does not.

Euro-Office’s formal pre-announcement in June moved the conversation forward. It leaned much further into a commitment to open standards, and we welcomed that shift while correcting one detail then circulating in the press: LibreOffice, developed under this Foundation for a decade and a half by a global — and substantially European — community, was never absent from the field Euro-Office proposes to enter. We also set out, plainly, the one destination consistent with the sovereignty the coalition invokes: ODF as its native document format, not merely a supported one.

The distinction is not a technicality. As we laid out in A Standard in Name Only, the version of OOXML every proprietary vendor ships by default is the Transitional conformance class — built to preserve decades of undocumented legacy behaviour from Microsoft Office versions of the 1990s, not the cleaner Strict variant an independent implementer could actually build to. An office suite that treats OOXML Transitional as its working format, however European its servers, is building on a specification only one vendor has ever fully implemented. What Euro-Office does next will show whether the coalition takes the final step from sovereign hosting to sovereign format.

Where Sovereignty Is Not an Abstraction: Real Deployments

Digital sovereignty is sometimes discussed as though it were a future aspiration. For a growing number of organisations, it is a present operational reality — and this year produced the clearest evidence of that yet.

In March, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation folded ODF, alongside PDF/UA, into the Deutschland-Stack, the technical framework that will govern digital infrastructure across every level of German public administration. OOXML did not make the list. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, TDF’s Executive Director, at the time — and as we argued in the days that followed, it is a decision the rest of Europe, and every digital policy advisor reading it, should be studying closely.

Germany is not alone. The Italian Ministry of Defence has spent several years migrating well over 100,000 workstations to LibreOffice under its LibreDifesa programme, reducing dependency on proprietary desktop software and building direct control over its document infrastructure. The French Gendarmerie nationale has pursued the same goal at comparable scale over two decades, moving the substantial majority of its computing estate to open-source software as part of a deliberate strategy to reduce vendor lock-in. And in August, in a two–part interview with the Austrian Bundesheer, we heard directly from the team that has moved 16,000 workstations off Microsoft Office: the decision traced back to a 2020 review of what guarantees existed for running office software without a cloud connection at all. The City of Munich’s long-running open-source initiative — despite its complex political history — remains the clearest illustration that sovereign document infrastructure is both technically achievable and organisationally demanding, at scale, inside a large public administration.

These are not proofs-of-concept. They are operational deployments in organisations for which the ability to control their own software stack is not an ideological preference but a security and continuity requirement.

They also illustrate something important: the question is no longer whether LibreOffice Technology can support enterprise-scale sovereign deployments, or whether governments will choose ODF when the choice is put to them plainly. Germany has already answered both. The question now is how quickly the rest of Europe follows.

Why “No Single Vendor Can Pull the Plug” Matters More Than Ever

In 2011, Oracle donated the OpenOffice.org codebase to the Apache Software Foundation and largely stepped back from development. The product that had been the leading open-source office suite effectively stalled. Development slowed, releases became infrequent, and the community migrated — mostly to LibreOffice, which had been founded in 2010 precisely to create a more independent governance structure.

This episode is instructive. A product can be open-source and still be effectively controlled by a single corporate actor. When that actor’s priorities change, the product suffers.

Much of what we have published this year has been an attempt to make that risk structural rather than anecdotal. The invisible architecture of lock-in traces how dependency on a document’s format cascades into dependency on the rendering engine that displays it and, beneath that, the fonts that give it its final shape — three technical layers, each one obscuring the one beneath it. The Calendar and the Invoice extends the same argument to two layers that are not technical at all: the migration deadline a vendor sets, and the subscription price it charges. Five layers, and what unites all of them is a single absence — the user has no exit.

The Document Foundation was designed with this risk explicitly in mind. TDF’s statutes prevent any single company or individual from controlling the foundation. Its governance model distributes decision-making across an elected board, a membership body, and an engineering steering committee. The LibreOffice Technology codebase cannot be re-licensed, sold, or restricted by any single party.

This is not an accident of history. It is an architectural decision about governance — as important to digital sovereignty as any technical specification.

What Sovereignty Requires of a Platform

Digital sovereignty is not a binary condition, and it is not the same thing as self-sufficiency. As we argued in July, it is not about owning everything — no institution, and certainly no continent, is going to reimplement the entire computing stack from silicon upward. It is about ensuring that nothing essential can be taken away. Different organisations will weigh that differently, but a platform that genuinely enables it must satisfy several non-negotiable criteria:

Open source with a robust licence. The code must be inspectable, modifiable, and redistributable. Not just available — auditable and forkable by any qualified party.

Open standards at the data layer. File formats must be governed by independent standards bodies, not by the platform vendor.

Independent governance. No single commercial entity should be able to make decisions — about licensing, pricing, feature development, or platform direction — that override the interests of the broader community of users and contributors.

An active, diverse contributor base. Sovereignty requires resilience. A platform maintained by a single company is a single point of failure.

Ecosystem depth. Sovereignty at the document layer requires that the platform be capable of supporting the full range of an organisation’s document needs — not just basic editing, but integration with enterprise systems, accessibility compliance, multi-language support, and cloud deployment.

LibreOffice Technology satisfies all of these criteria. We are not aware of another document software platform that does.

Sovereignty Starts Here: The Story So Far

When we first sketched out this argument, we framed it as the opening of a campaign. Several months on — with the Euro-Office debate still very much alive, Germany’s Deutschland-Stack mandate now a matter of public record, and the US CISA’s own guidance on open-source verifiability landing squarely in the same argument — it makes more sense to call it what it has become: an ongoing, evidence-led case, not a one-off pitch.

If you want the fuller version, the pieces above trace most of the argument in detail: what digital sovereignty actually means and doesn’t mean; the layered architecture of lock-in and its non-technical extensions; what separates a genuinely open format from one that merely claims the label; the Euro-Office exchange in both its instalments; and, most concretely, the Austrian Bundesheer’s own account of why and how it moved 16,000 desktops off Microsoft Office. Together with the Deutschland-Stack decision, they are the evidence behind everything argued in this piece.

We are not finished. There are interoperability failures we haven’t yet written about, further national deployments to document as they happen, and — with LibreOffice 26.8 due for release on 26 August — a platform that keeps giving us more to report on. Watch this space for what comes next.

If you are a journalist or analyst covering digital sovereignty, open source, or public-sector technology, we would like to talk. If you are an organisation considering or using LibreOffice Technology and would like to share your experience, we would welcome the conversation. Reach out to our communications team at media@documentfoundation.org.

Digital sovereignty requires infrastructure that is genuinely open. That infrastructure exists. It is called LibreOffice Technology, and — as the months since we first wrote that line have gone on to show — this really is where the story starts.

The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice. It is independent, non-commercial, and governed by its membership community. LibreOffice Technology is the open platform on which LibreOffice and a growing ecosystem of document applications are built.

Tags: digital sovereignty, LibreOffice Technology, open document format, ODF, open source, The Document Foundation, public sector IT, vendor lock-in, document software, Euro-Office, Deutschland-Stack

Further Reading on This Blog

The posts behind the argument above, in the order they were published:

• Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward — March 2026
• Euro-Office: sovereign in name only, or in reality too? — April 2026
• A Standard in Name Only: What OOXML Transitional Tells Us About Format Sovereignty — June 2026
• Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF — June 2026
• The Invisible Architecture of Lock-In: the Layering of Dependencies — June 2026
• The Non-Technical Dependency Layers: the Calendar and the Invoice — July 2026
• What Is Digital Sovereignty — July 2026
• CISA Publishes Open Source Security Guidance: Verifiability Is the Difference — August 2026
• The Characteristics of a Truly Open Document Standard Format — August 2026
• Why and How the Austrian Military Moved to LibreOffice (Part 1) — August 2026
• Why and How the Austrian Military Moved to LibreOffice (Part 2) — August 2026

External Resources

• ISO/IEC 26300:2006 — Open Document Format for Office Applications, the official ISO standard page for ODF.
• Public Money? Public Code!, the Free Software Foundation Europe’s campaign for public code as the default for publicly funded software.
• European Interoperability Framework, the European Commission’s guidance on interoperable digital public services.
• Deutschland-Stack, the German federal government’s official site for its sovereign digital infrastructure programme.

A truly open document format requires free public availability, royalty-free standards, and no usage restrictions.

Organizations like the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Union use several core rules to guarantee long-term data access, system independence, and freedom from single-vendor control.

Core Openness Criteria

• Public Specification: The complete format rules are published and easy for anyone to access.
• Royalty-Free: Patents or licensing fees cannot block developers from building compatible software.
• No Discrimination: Anyone can use the format for any purpose without needing special permission.
• Independent Control: A transparent, non-profit standards body manages future updates.

Recognized Frameworks

• The Open Definition: Specifies exact legal and technical terms for open works.
• European Interoperability Framework (EIF): Requires governments to use truly open formats for public documents.

Comparison of ODF and OOXML

When evaluated against the strict criteria for open formats, Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) take fundamentally different approaches.

While both are recognized as official ISO standards, ODF fully satisfies the open standard criteria by design, whereas OOXML features structural and legal complexities that often limit true open implementation.

Comparison Table

Criterion	Open Document Format (ODF)	Office Open XML (OOXML)
Public Specification	Fully Transparent. Concise, streamlined specifications built using a simplified RelaxNG XML schema	Highly Complex. Over 6,000 pages of specifications containing fragmented legacy behaviors.
Royalty-Free Status	Unconditional. Managed under standard royalty-free parameters for universal software design.	Conditional. Covered under a non-revocable patent promise rather than a traditional license.
No Discrimination	Complete. Equal implementation across open-source and proprietary suites.	Functional Barriers. Biased toward Windows-centric legacy and platform-specific behaviors.
Independent Control	Vendor-Neutral. Managed entirely by OASIS	Vendor-Influenced. Maintained via ISO, but the structural core remains tightly bound to Microsoft.

Key Openness Differences

Public Specification & Transparency

• ODF: Conceived from the beginning to be a modern, clean XML specification. “ODF is the only openly available standard, published fully in a document that is freely available and easy to comprehend”, as noted by GranneBlog: https://blog.granneman.com/2009/02/06/odf-compared-constrasted-with-ooxml/
• OOXML: Designed primarily to map Microsoft Office’s old binary data into XML. It is split into Strict and Transitional variants. “Transitional is everything else: a vast catalogue of compatibility features, deprecated elements, platform-specific behaviours, and references to undocumented quirks of Microsoft Office versions from the 1990s.”, as noted by the TDF Blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/06/02/a-standard-in-name-only/

Legal & Intellectual Property Rules

• ODF: Utilizes a standard open-source framework. Anyone can implement ODF in a project without fearing intellectual property or patent litigation.
• OOXML: Relies on the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise. The OSP is a unilateral covenant not to sue, but it only covers developers to the extent that they precisely mirror the specification. Any implementation-defined deviations or edge cases may leave developers legally unprotected.

Technical Discrimination & System Control

• ODF: Avoids hardware-specific dependencies, ensuring that independent applications (like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice) can render the data uniformly.
• OOXML: Contains platform-specific elements tied closely to the Windows OS ecosystem. Because Microsoft Office has traditionally produced Transitional OOXML by default, third-party platforms encounter massive conversion obstacles when interpreting legacy binary elements or proprietary formatting definitions embedded within the file structure.

INTERESTING REFERENCE: the Italian definition

The document Linee guida su acquisizione e riuso di software per le pubbliche amministrazioni (Guidelines on the procurement and reuse of software for public administrations), published by AgID in 2021, define an open format in the glossary as follows (translated from Italian):

Open (data) format. This is a public, versioned data format that is comprehensively documented and has no implementation constraints. An open format is one recognised by a standardisation body and maintained collaboratively by several organisations that provide competing implementations, through a transparent process. The format must remain consistent with the declared version.

The guidelines are not an interpretive gloss issued alongside the statute. They are adopted in implementation of articles 68 and 69 of the Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale, under express delegations contained in the statute itself. They also supersede the earlier AgID circular 63/2013 on the same comparative assessment.

The definition of formato aperto (open format) is therefore not a recommendation that happens to be well drafted. It is the operative legal definition for Italian public administration, and it acquires that force through the statute rather than in spite of it.

On 30 July 2026, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices, a 31-page guidance document for federal civilian agencies. It is available at no cost and marked TLP:CLEAR, meaning it may be shared without restriction.

The document is addressed to US federal agencies, and it fulfils obligations under two executive orders on federal cybersecurity. It covers four areas: using open source solutions, contributing to open source projects, producing open source software, and evaluating open source artificial intelligence models. The observations below concern the first three.

Its analytical content is not jurisdiction-specific, and public administrations elsewhere — including in Europe — will find that it articulates, in the vocabulary of risk management, several positions that the open source community has been arguing for two decades.

What the guidance actually says

The central claim is more precise than the headlines suggest. CISA does not assert that open source software is more secure than proprietary software. It states that OSS is “no more or less risky than other software,” and locates the difference elsewhere: with open source, an organisation can assess code quality and security directly, rather than relying solely on vendor assurances.

This is a claim about verifiability, not about defect rates. It is also the more defensible claim, and the more consequential one for procurement. An agency evaluating proprietary software is evaluating a vendor’s statement about its own product. An agency evaluating open source software is evaluating the product.

The guidance draws the corollary explicitly. Among the benefits it lists for federal agencies is reduced vendor lock-in: open standards and modifiable code, CISA writes, protect agencies from “proprietary dependency traps.” A national cybersecurity authority has placed lock-in inside a security document rather than a competition-policy one. That is a meaningful shift in where this argument is permitted to live.

The C4 Framework

The most practically useful part of the guidance is Appendix A, which sets out the C4 Framework for assessing whether an open source project is trustworthy. Its premise is that, because contributors may be pseudonymous and are bound by no delivery obligation, trustworthiness cannot be assessed from who produced the software. It must be assessed from how the software was produced — which open source development makes visible in a way that closed development does not.

C4 groups the evidence into four categories:

• Codebase — commit recency, known vulnerabilities, dependency currency.
• Community — number of maintainers, institutional structure, whether the project sits within a foundation.
• Conduct — whether there is a vulnerability disclosure policy, whether code review is required, whether maintainers merge their own commits, the licence, the code of conduct.
• Configuration — whether defaults are secure, and what hardening the software supports.

The framework is applied in five steps: identify measurable criteria, determine risk tolerance and weight the criteria, collect observations (with automated tooling where available), evaluate against each criterion, and compare the result to the tolerance.

We would encourage public administrations to apply this framework to LibreOffice. Every category can be answered from public evidence: a continuous commit history since 2010, a published security policy and disclosure process, mandatory peer review, an OSI-approved licence, a documented code of conduct, and a governance structure — The Document Foundation, a German Stiftung with an elected Board of Directors — that is a matter of public record rather than of assertion.

We would encourage administrations to apply the same framework to every candidate solution, including proprietary ones, and to note which questions can be answered and which cannot.

Contributing, and the support question

The guidance also addresses a question that public administrations regularly raise about open source adoption: who is responsible for fixes. CISA’s answer is that no single entity is obliged to provide them, and that agencies should therefore plan accordingly — assigning internal staff, contracting third parties, or both — while following two principles in dealing with upstream projects: collaborate rather than demand, and push fixes upstream.

This is a fair description of how the LibreOffice ecosystem works. Support, long-term maintenance, and custom development are provided by certified developers and certified migration professionals, whose contributions return to the shared codebase and benefit every other deployment. The guidance is right that this requires organisations to plan for it. It is also right that the resulting improvements are shared rather than captured.

CISA further notes that where a project becomes unmaintained, an organisation may as a last resort take over a fork. This option has no equivalent in proprietary software, where end of support arrives on the supplier’s schedule and offers no remedy at all.

A note on scope

The document does not name any product. CISA states explicitly that it does not endorse commercial entities, products, or services, and nothing in the guidance should be read as an assessment of any particular software. What it provides is a set of criteria. The observation that LibreOffice satisfies them is ours, and rests on evidence that anyone may check.

Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices is available from CISA: https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/open-source-software-security-principles-and-practices

CISA’s announcement: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/cisa-guide-helps-federal-agencies-securely-and-effectively-use-open-source-software