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.)

Any other choice is a choice of dependence on a single vendor

Digital sovereignty begins with the document format. Everything else – server location, hosting jurisdiction, procurement clauses – is downstream of this single decision. If the format is standard and open, the user controls the document. If the format is proprietary the vendor controls it, even when the file sits on the user’s own hard drive.

This is why LibreOffice, and its derivatives such as Collabora Office and Online, are today the only legitimate choice for governments, supranational bodies, businesses and organisations that want to protect the digital freedom of their users. Only software based on the LibreOffice source code – the LibreOffice Technology – uses ODF as its native document format. Every document saved, stored, retained and exchanged in ODF remains the exclusive property of its author, and remains so over the years.

ODF – Open Document Format, as the name says – was designed and developed in accordance with the characteristics of a true open standard: clearly documented, transparently developed by an independent body, properly versioned, built on existing standards, and stored in XML files that any user can read.

None of this applies to OOXML. The name is itself an oxymoron: XML stands for eXtended Markup Language, which is open by definition, but OOXML’s syntax is so complex that it is unreadable even to advanced users. The format was deliberately designed to become a sophisticated lock-in tool at a moment when Microsoft’s other strategies had already been uncovered and analysed.

The Transitional/Strict bait-and-switch

OOXML was approved as an ISO standard through a process that was an affront to transparency, ethics, common sense and respect for users. The format is documented in a way that discourages consultation – over 7,500 pages – and is developed by Microsoft behind closed doors in Redmond.

It is not versioned. It uses no independent standards. On the contrary, it relies on proprietary Microsoft formats wherever possible, in some cases formats that Microsoft itself had deprecated because the market rejected them. It is not even compatible with the Gregorian calendar. The XML schemas are nearly absurd in their complexity.

The bait-and-switch worked like this: “I swear it will be Transitional until 2010, very proprietary and very little of a standard, and after that only Strict, not very proprietary and very much a standard.”

The catch: Strict never materialised in practice. For years it lingered as a last-resort option that no one was meant to use, and it has now disappeared from the Save As options altogether. The standardised version of OOXML – the one ISO was told would become the real format – no longer exists as a user choice. Only Transitional remains.

A pity, because we would have had a laugh with Strict’s bugs. Excel has a thing for getting dates wrong (the (in)famous 1900 leap-year bug, inherited from Lotus 1-2-3 and never fixed), and when Excel gets dates wrong, no other software does it worse.

The political consequences

All of this is hard …

Most people, including many competent software developers, think of a digital document the way they think of a sheet of paper: an inert object that holds words and pictures, indifferent to the tool used to open it. This intuition is wrong, and the consequences of getting it wrong shape everything from vendor lock-in to cybersecurity to the long-term readability of public records.

A digital document is not paper. It is a piece of software.

The HTML parallel

The clearest way to see this is to think about a web page. When you visit a website, your browser receives a file – an HTML document – and executes it. It parses the markup, applies styling rules, runs embedded scripts, fetches additional resources, and assembles the result into something you can read. The page you see on screen is not a static image transmitted from the server, it is the output of a small program that your browser ran on your behalf.

Nobody disputes that a web browser is software. Yet the HTML file it consumes is also, in a meaningful sense, software: a set of instructions describing what should happen when the file is opened. Change the instructions, and the rendered page changes. Withhold the specification of how the instructions should be interpreted, and only the party holding the specification can guarantee a faithful rendering.

It is worth remembering that the openness of HTML did not happen by accident, and was nearly lost. In the early 2000s, Internet Explorer 6 commanded around ninety per cent of the browser market, and Microsoft used that dominance to push proprietary extensions to HTML, CSS, and the document model: non-standard tags, behaviours, and filters that worked only in their browser.

Web developers, desperate to reach users, began coding both to Internet Explorer and to the standard, carrying the cost of that double work themselves, while the vendor reaped the benefit of lock-in either way. The open web did not fragment, but only because developers absorbed the cost of holding it together. Had they stopped, HTML would have quietly become whatever Microsoft shipped next.

It took a sustained effort by the W3C, by competing browsers such as Firefox, and by the community of standards-conscious developers to pull the web back onto open ground. Had that effort failed, HTML today would not be a shared language, but a Microsoft product. The web survived because the standard was defended. Document formats have not always been so lucky.

An office document – a DOCX, an ODT, a PPTX, a PDF – works exactly the same way. It is a structured file containing instructions: this text in this font at this size, this image embedded here, this table laid out this way, this field recalculated automatically, this macro executed on opening. When you “open” the document, an application reads those instructions and runs them. The page you see on screen is the output of a program – the office suite – executing the instructions contained in the document.

The document is the code. The office suite …

Berlin, 12 May 2026 – The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.8.7, the final maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.8 family, available for download at www.libreoffice.org/download [1]. Users of LibreOffice 25.8.x should update to LibreOffice 26.2.x as LibreOffice 25.8’s end of life will be on June 12, and after that date the software will not receive additional security updates.

LibreOffice 25.8.7 is based on LibreOffice Technology, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – either from TDF or from the ecosystem – that fully supports the two document format standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP), and the closed and proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF recommends a LibreOffice Enterprise optimized version, with dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years. Additional details at: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

English manuals for the LibreOffice 25.8 family are available for download at books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.

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

[1] Fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.8.7/RC1. Fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.8.7/RC2. Fixes in RC3: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.8.7/RC3.

The LibreOffice Google Summer of Code projects have been selected for 2026.

• Aya Jamal – OpenType MATH: this project aims to add support for OpenType fonts that contain a MATH table. Data from the MATH table will be used to layout math formulas.
• Manish Bera – Improve word processor test coverage: Writer is the most complex application in LibreOffice. The tests written in the scope of this project will make for a better developer experience. One aim is to restart the automated generation of LCOV test coverage reports.
• Jesus Solis – JPEG XL import support: while JPEG XL has only recently started to be adopted by web browsers, it is already used in fields such as medical imaging, professional photography, PDF & EPUB authoring and handling geospatial and archival data. Having support for it in LibreOffice would therefore make for a smoother experience for the users who rely on the format.

Good luck to the contributors – we appreciate their work on these important features and improvements! And thanks to our mentors for assisting them: Khaled Hosny (Alif Type); Jonathan Clark and Xisco Faulí (TDF).

Between August 17 and 24, contributors will submit their code, project summaries, and final evaluations of their mentors. Find out more about the timeline here, and check out more details about the projects on this page.

Berlin, 8 May 2026 – Twenty years ago this week, on 3 May 2006, the Open Document Format cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 with unanimous approval. On 30 November 2006 it was published as ISO/IEC 26300. Two decades later, ODF remains what it was on the day of its ratification: the only open, vendor-neutral, freely implementable international standard for office documents in existence.

Everything else on the market is a vendor format with a standards number attached.

That distinction was contested in 2006. It is not contestable in 2026. The competing format pushed through ISO in 2008 – under a fast-track process whose abuses are now part of the documentary record of standards governance – has since splintered into a Strict variant almost no implementation actually uses and a Transitional variant that preserves, by design, the undocumented behaviours of a single vendor’s legacy products. A standard that exists to encode one company’s bugs is not a standard. It is a moat with a certificate.

ODF has no Transitional mode. It has no undocumented behaviours. It has no vendor whose commercial roadmap can quietly rewrite what conformance means. The specification is publicly available at no cost from ISO and from OASIS. The schemas are auditable. The implementations are multiple, independent, and free. This is not advocacy language. It is the working definition of a standard, and ODF is the only office-document format that meets it.

The political weather has finally caught up with the technical reality. Germany’s federal administration has mandated ODF through the Deutschland-Stack. The European Commission’s own services are under sustained pressure – including from this Foundation – to align procurement with the open-standards commitments the Commission itself has signed. Brazil has legislated open formats into its educational system through Lei 15.211/2025. The pattern is the same on every continent where public bodies have stopped to ask the only question that matters: in what format does a society keep its own records, and who decides when that format changes?

For twenty years, the answer to the second question – for any administration that chose ODF – has been: we do. For any administration that chose the alternative, the answer has been: the vendor does, and the administration will be informed.

“ODF is the document format of a public that has decided not to outsource its memory,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “The governments now mandating ODF are not making a technical choice. They are reclaiming a sovereignty they should never have surrendered.”

The implementation landscape reflects the same divide. LibreOffice, developed by The Document Foundation and a global community of contributors, uses ODF as its native format and is the reference implementation of the standard. Collabora Online extends ODF support to enterprise and cloud deployments. Together they constitute the working core of the ODF ecosystem. Other office suites – including those that market themselves with the vocabulary of openness while defaulting to a competitor’s vendor format – are …