Love LibreOffice? Got experience with infrastructure and system administration? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new people with fresh ideas into our project.

To assist the LibreOffice community with its work, we are looking for a full-time (remote) Infrastructure and System Administrator, to start as soon as possible.

Here’s what you’ll do

• System orchestration and OS management: Orchestrate, deploy, and maintain all internal and external systems, specifically standard and customised Linux operating systems, with the majority of machines running Debian GNU/Linux. We currently run SaltStack, but proposals for different ways to handle config management and deployment are welcome.
• Virtualisation and storage infrastructure: Manage virtualisation platforms and hypervisors (KVM/QEMU). Experience with GlusterFS (for the backup system) is a plus, but not mandatory.
• Database, cloud, and App Administration: Administer database servers such as MariaDB and PostgreSQL, cloud storage repositories (such as Nextcloud), web applications, email services, and developer tooling.
• Network and hardware maintenance: Maintain core physical and cloud network infrastructure, including routers, switches, and NAS storage, amongst them devices from MikroTik.
• Security and network access: Oversee firewalls, intrusion detection, antivirus, IP reputation, global mirror systems, and secure VPNs for users and machines.
• Identity and access management: Deploy and manage single sign-on (SSO) solutions, directory services, domain names, DNS zones, and SSL certificates (PKI).
• Ensure stable operations and monitoring: Together with teammates and volunteers, ensure stable infrastructure availability, manage log analysis, handle emergencies, and coordinate with external providers during outages.
• Patch management: Execute timely deployments of security and software updates within scheduled maintenance windows.
• Team coordination and documentation: Lead and coordinate the infrastructure team, volunteer contributors, and third-party vendors, while keeping technical documentation up to date.
• Data protection and disaster recovery: Implement backup and point-in-time disaster recovery solutions, and manage infrastructure-related GDPR compliance in cooperation with privacy officers.

What we want from you

• Very good sysadmin and infra maintenance skills on Linux
• Good team-playing abilities
• Speaking and writing English

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

Join us!

All jobs at The Document Foundation are remote jobs, where you can work from your home office or a co-working space. The work time during the day is flexible, apart from a few fixed meetings. The role is offered as full-time (ideally 40 hours per week). While we prefer full-time for the role, part-time applications, or proposals to grow the hours over time, will be considered. Candidates that are resident in Germany will be employed directly by TDF. Otherwise, external payroll services will be used if available in the candidate’s country of residence.

Are you interested? Get in touch!

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, gender, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age. Don’t be …

Dear office suite users,

In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010.

These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty.

It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile.

If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept the flag of open-source office suites flying when everyone was predicting their demise, and who continued to develop the only truly open and standard format that guarantees Digital Sovereignty, as it provides full user control over content.

Document formats are a subject still rife with misinformation. This is understandable on the part of Microsoft, which developed and controls the horrible proprietary OOXML format, designed precisely to prevent Digital Sovereignty by maintaining content lock-in. It is far less understandable on the part of companies that claim to advocate open source, such as those promoting Euro-Office.

Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe.

So, despite what is being written in support of Euro-Office — the latest of the office suites developed in Europe, and not the first — the announcement is not against Microsoft. On the contrary, it strengthens Microsoft’s strategy against European Digital Sovereignty, or, if you prefer, against the freedom of European users to control and manage their own content.

Berlin, 5 June 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.4, the fourth 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 26.2.4 is available for immediate download at libreoffice.org/download/ for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Users of LibreOffice 25.8.x should update to LibreOffice 26.2.4 as LibreOffice 25.8 branch will reach end of life on June 12, and after that date the software will not receive security updates. In late August 2026, The Document Foundation will announce LibreOffice 26.8.

LibreOffice 26.2 introduced a broad set of improvements to daily productivity workflows, including Markdown import and export, connector shapes in Calc, multi-user Base, faster EPUB export, and mandatory Skia rendering on macOS and Windows for better graphics performance. LibreOffice 26.2.4 consolidates these advances with a focused set of fixes, addressing issues identified by users and testers since the initial release.

List of fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.4/RC1. List of fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.4/RC2.

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

When a public administration is told its documents are stored in “an ISO standard format,” the assumption is reasonable: an ISO standard ought to be a clean, implementable specification that any qualified software vendor can support. Standards exist precisely so that nobody is locked to a single supplier.

OOXML — ISO/IEC 29500, the format behind Microsoft’s docx, xlsx and pptx files — does not work this way.

The standard is split into two conformance classes. Strict is the clean version: a modern document format, free of legacy baggage, that an independent implementer could reasonably support. 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. The Transitional class exists to ensure that documents converted from the old binary doc, xls and ppt formats can be represented in XML without loss.

There is one detail that matters above all others: Microsoft Office has never produced Strict OOXML by default. The option to save in Strict format is available in the installed desktop applications but is absent from the browser-based versions of Microsoft 365 — and Microsoft’s various editions have long differed in which features they offer, with the macOS version historically providing a different set of options from the Windows version. The “ISO standard” that public administrations are actually storing their documents in, when they use Office, is Transitional — the messy one. Strict is a feature you can find if you know where to look, on the platforms where Microsoft has chosen to support it. That is not the treatment a serious open standard receives.

This has consequences that go well beyond a technicality.

The standard codifies undocumented legacy behaviour. Transitional OOXML contains compatibility flags whose specification amounts to “behave like Word 95” or “lay out footnotes like Word 97.” These are not formal definitions. They are references to the behaviour of specific commercial software products released more than thirty years ago — products whose layout algorithms were never published. An independent implementer wishing to render such a document correctly must reverse-engineer software from the Windows 95 era. This is not standardisation in any meaningful sense; it is the codification of one vendor’s implementation history as a global norm.

The standard perpetuates known bugs. Excel famously treats 1900 as a leap year — it was not — because Lotus 1-2-3 did so in the 1980s, and Microsoft chose binary compatibility with Lotus over arithmetic correctness [1]. OOXML Transitional preserves this bug. The default workbook setting in every xlsx file you have ever opened encodes a date arithmetic error from the era of MS-DOS. A spreadsheet calculating durations across February 1900 will produce wrong answers, and the standard requires this.

The standard includes obsolete graphics formats. Vector Markup Language (VML) was submitted by Microsoft to the W3C in 1998 as a candidate vector graphics standard. The W3C rejected it in favour of SVG. VML should have died there. Instead, it lives on inside OOXML Transitional, because documents converted …

LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world, working on code, documentation, QA, translations, marketing, infrastructure and much more. Coordinating the project’s activities is the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Let’s see what the team members do:

1. Christian Lohmaier, Release Engineer

Christian’s typical tasks include taking care of the continuous integration system (both the automation server and the build machines), managing the LibreOffice release process, handling app store updates with all the paperwork that entails, managing the technical side of language translations not only for LibreOffice, but for any translatable system we have and making sure our integration with payment platforms works smoothly. He has also been involved in creating and maintaining websites and web services.

Christian’s work is influencing the developer experience as well. In the past, LibreOffice’s Windows development setup was somewhat messy. After Christian introduced automation into the setup process with the help of WinGet scripts, there has been much less need for troubleshooting.

2. Dan Williams, Developer

Dan was involved in the Mac port back in the 2000s when LibreOffice was still called OpenOffice.org. For some months now he has been working for TDF on user interface and macOS tasks. He has done corrections to the handling of system UI themes, implemented support for special macOS keyboard shortcuts and macOS-specific menu items, fixed database links going missing from .ods files, and fixed an issue with printing notes from Impress presentations on macOS. His ongoing work includes experimenting with Qt UI on macOS and reworking the code for Notebookbar.

3. Florian Effenberger, Executive Director

Florian is one of the founders of TDF, and its Executive Director since 2014. He manages our worldwide team of 18 people, and deals with a variety of tasks in accounting, financials, taxes, budget, payroll, annual audit, banking, legal topics, employment and HR. He supports the board and the membership committee and onboards those new in office. He regularly gives presentations at events, is active in the German community and has written extensively about the tasks he is involved on our forum.

4. Guilhem Moulin, Infrastructure & Services

Guilhem is managing our servers and the approximately twenty web services needed every day by LibreOffice users and contributors. Major updates to the operating systems and the web applications require careful studying of what needs to be taken into account to ensure everything keeps operating smoothly. Often this goes into the level of studying individual code changes. Compatibility breakage has to be mitigated or at least communicated.

5. Heiko Tietze, UX Architect

Heiko is collaborating with user experience design volunteers in planning improvements to LibreOffice. Not being content with planning, he then goes and implements the proposals, either by himself or with help from others. Heiko always denies being a C++ developer yet inexplicably has over 700 LibreOffice code changes in his name. He has mentored in over a dozen Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy projects, for example in the reworking …

Executive Summary

This proposal suggests restarting LibreOffice web, mobile, and cloud development by structuring the project into a set of independent initiatives. Each initiative can be pursued separately from the others, and their deliverables will be useful improvements to LibreOffice even without the other components.

• Responsive user interface
• Web distribution based on desktop version using WebAssembly
• Mobile distributions based on desktop version
• Document server and integration
• Client-server collaborative editing

One of the greatest risks to large software projects is schedule slip due to dependencies between components. By structuring the project as independent initiatives with separate deliverables, rather than a single monolithic project, we can reduce that risk. This approach also calls for a high level of code sharing across the desktop, web, and mobile versions, which will reduce both our initial development and long-term code maintenance costs.

The result of this project will be a blended web, mobile, and cloud offering and development strategy, which will signal to the public that LibreOffice is on a clear trajectory toward achieving technical parity with the major commercial office suites. In lieu of invasive first-party cloud service integrations, we will aim to offer server components that are lightweight and inexpensive to host, and make it easy for users to work with multiple server providers.

Please note that this document is intended as a strategy proposal, not as a technical specification or project plan. Technical and planning commentary in this document should be considered speculative. Additional work is needed to prepare concrete implementation plans for each initiative, should we choose to proceed with this strategy.

Market Analysis

Consumers

Due to the nature of our project, we have relatively little visibility into the needs of our end users. We also have limited resources to conduct primary market research, in part out of consideration for user privacy. Most of our institutional understanding of end user needs comes from engaged community members who volunteer their time to advocate for their particular interests, which may not be representative of larger populations.

Rather than investigate the needs of end users directly, we can instead borrow from economics and examine the revealed preferences of consumers: if a great majority of people select one product over its alternatives, ceteris paribus, we may safely assume those people prefer that product. Thus, the features our major competitors use to distinguish themselves can serve as signposts for what users consider when choosing between cloud-enabled office suites.

Service Providers

One special case is the group of users who are invested in deploying and operating cloud-enabled office suites. This category ranges from institutional IT decision-makers, to on-premises cloud software vendors such as Nextcloud.

The Document Foundation has not been previously involved with developing or marketing a cloud-enabled office suite. As a result, we have few direct contacts we can use in order to gather requirements. However, we may be able to draw some conclusions about what this category of consumer wants based on public comments and prevailing economic and regulatory conditions.

For server operators, the world …

A number of journalists read last week’s piece as an attack on Microsoft. We want to explain what they walked past.

Whenever we address the contrast between ODF and OOXML, some people perceive it as a campaign against a company. It is not. We are trying to do something far more useful: to make the structural problem with the standard document format clear to those who have to live with it: public officials, educators, and above all, individual citizens.

All these people find themselves facing a problem they did not create, but which affects them daily, and of which they are often the unwitting victims, every time they create a document or receive one.

The least we can do – and in fact we have been doing it for twenty years, though until now almost no one has listened – is to explain, clearly and without drama, how the problem arose, why it persists, and why ODF is the only way out. It is an educational and selfless goal – we do not sell software, so we have no commercial interest to protect – and not an attack on a company.

The problem concerns the current document landscape, based almost exclusively on a proprietary format controlled by a single company, and what we could have had instead: a standard format controlled by an independent community of stakeholders.

Microsoft features in this story because of the rational-monopolist behaviour it has exhibited since 2006, during and after the standardization of the proprietary OOXML format: first promising the standard and then doing everything possible to ensure it was first ignored and then forgotten, quietly but with extreme determination. All of this to protect a market share now worth over $30 billion, which would have been at risk of erosion if the document format had been genuinely standardized: migration to any other office suite would then have been free of cost and complexity.

Today, most organizations – public agencies, supranational bodies, companies – and most individual users face a problem that, had everyone listened to independent experts between 2006 and 2008, would never have existed. The international standards system and national governments allowed a single vendor – rather than the community of developers, systems analysts and standards scholars who raised objections – to set the terms under which documents would be archived. That vendor chose its own proprietary format.

The problem, in other words, was created by institutions – ISO, national standards bodies, public officials and ultimately politicians – who approached the choice of format for public documents in a completely uncritical manner. They trusted the process despite repeated and legitimate protests about its transparency, and never thought to perform a simple file analysis that would, in a few minutes, have raised more than a few doubts. The industry then followed the vendor’s lead, for convenience, because it expanded the business – without weighing the medium- and long-term consequences for institutions and individual users. What is troubling is that even a segment of the open-source industry went with the flow, and continues to …

LibreOffice is a desktop application, and we will continue making it. But we have constant requests for web and mobile versions, so here is our updated plan. These are minutes from the TDF Team and Board of Directors meetings on web and mobile strategy for LibreOffice:

Who was present

Team: Michael Weghorn, Jonathan Clark, Sophie Gautier, Neil Roberts, Mike Saunders, Guilhem Moulin, Heiko Tietze, Ilmari Lauhakangas, Dan Williams, Xisco Fauli, Christian Lohmaier, Vissarion Fysikopoulos, Juan José Gonzalez, Olivier Hallot, Florian Effenberger, Hossein Nourikah

Board: Eliane Domingos, Mike Saunders, Paolo Vecchi, Simon Phipps, Sophie Gautier

Summary

The meetings, which took place April 20, April 22 and May 19, focused on discussing LibreOffice and TDF strategies for the evolving development landscape and the future of LibreOffice across all platforms – desktop, mobile, and cloud. Team roles were reviewed, and new assignments were proposed.

Status of the current foundation team activities

Since 2020, the development of LibreOffice within the foundation focused almost uniquely on the desktop version of LibreOffice (and to a lesser extent, the Android viewer app) and that part will continue unchanged. Therefore the foundation will continue to deliver two major LibreOffice releases per year.

Engineering Steering Committee (ESC)

The current ESC members and activities remain unchanged, and weekly meetings continue with reports on activities, releases, topics and project management. The meeting, as always, is open to the development community.

Community support

No changes in vision for community support. Regional events and special projects remains as they are, and require proper and timely project submission and available budget. Google Summer of Code and Outreachy will continue as before. The LibreOffice Conference 2026 is planned and will take place in Pordenone, northern Italy.

Marketing and communications

Marketing and communications will adapt to the current situation of the foundation and LibreOffice . More communication of team activities and product development is needed, as well as improving the use of social networks for mass communication. Unification of the several different blogs is under consideration.

Challenges ahead

The foundation is challenged to address the following areas:

• Develop an online and mobile version of the suite. The challenge is to select the technology that fulfill both end-user and server side management
• Innovate in collaboration such as peer-to-peer document editing
• Continue to produce two releases per year of the desktop and Android viewer versions
• Improve the user interface and usability of LibreOffice
• Keep the quality and security of the office suite
• Develop new features and improve current features
• Cherry-pick relevant features and improvements from other software producers
• Full support of the Open Document Format (ODF)
• Produce adequate documentation for development processes and the current and new products
• Be an active participant of the major open source communities and government initiatives for FOSS and nations’ sovereignty
• Preserve donation inflow and pursue corporate or government donations through development projects

New assignments of the team

It was suggested that the team be distributed in two parts, with proper interaction between the groups. Additional headcounts, as well as external contracts are considered to …

LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages, thanks to the work of localisation communities around the world. We asked them to summarise their work in 2025 – here’s what they had to say…

Czech

The Czech community maintained an active presence both online and in-person. Their localisation efforts remained strong, keeping the UI fully translated and the Help files at 95% completion. The team also stayed connected with their user base through the Czech Ask LibreOffice site along, with social media presence across X, Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon.

There was also outreach at events. The team hosted dedicated LibreOffice booths at InstallFest in April and LinuxDays in October, both held in Prague. Documentation also saw significant updates, with the publication of the Getting Started Guide (24.8), the Calc Guide (25.2), and the Draw Guide (25.8).

Danish

The Danish community focused on multimedia education and consistent localisation in 2025. There was the launch of the @libreofficeskolen (“LibreOffice School”) YouTube channel. This initiative provides the Danish-speaking public with a series of instructional videos designed to lower the barrier to entry for new users. Alongside this output, the community kept the UI and Help files fully translated at 100%, and ensured that LibreOffice promotional videos were accessible via localised subtitles.

Dutch

Beyond maintaining the local website and providing assistance via the Ask LibreOffice website and mailing lists, the Dutch-speaking community worked on many documentation updates.

Beginning in January with the Calc Guide for 24.8, the community then published a steady stream of translated manuals for version 25.2, including the Writer, Impress, Math, and Getting Started Guides. This effort then lead to the release of the updated 25.2 Calc Guide in July. On the localisation front, the Dutch team continued their work on Weblate, successfully maintaining 100% translation coverage for both the User Interface (UI) and the Help system, following upstream changes.

Finnish

The Finnish community focused on steady and ongoing translation efforts. The team prioritised localisation of the UI, with secondary work continuing on the Help system. To ensure the long-term sustainability of these efforts, the community has been proactive in outreach, utilising the vapaaehtoistyo.fi online platform to recruit new volunteers.

French

On the technical front, the French-speaking team maintained 100% translation coverage for both the UI and Help systems across all versions of LibreOffice. Their localisation work extended to the new Hugo-based website, release notes, and the Extensions wiki page. Significant progress was also made on the translation of Calc functions on the wiki and the subtitling of promotional videos.

Outreach was a major topic in 2025, with the community representing LibreOffice at events like Capitole du Libre in Toulouse, and Open Source Experience in Paris. The team also worked on academic ties, coordinating with UBO University to involve translation students in user guide writing. Beyond documentation and QA, the French team supported users through the Ask LibreOffice site and published various articles on LinuxFR. In addition, there were REGEX tutorials for civil servants and …

LibreOffice is free thanks to your donations. Here’s how your support helps us to improve the software and grow the community that makes it (Note: this video is also available on PeerTube.)