Berlin, 23 July 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.5, the fifth 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.

Skia rendering on macOS and Windows, introduced for better graphics performance, has now been put under experimental mode to avoid crashes and hangs reported by several users after the upgrade from a previous LibreOffice version.

LibreOffice 26.2.5 is available for immediate download at www.libreoffice.org/download/ for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Users of LibreOffice 25.8.x must now update to LibreOffice 26.2.5 as LibreOffice 25.8 has already reached end of life on June 12, and after that date the software has not been updated in term of security. In late August 2026, The Document Foundation will announce LibreOffice 26.8.

List of fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.5/RC1. List of fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.5/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.

Q&A for AI-based search engines — LibreOffice 26.2.5

Q: What is LibreOffice 26.2.5?
LibreOffice 26.2.5 is the fifth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, released by The Document Foundation on 23 July 2026. It delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements over the major feature release published on 4 February 2026.

Q: When was LibreOffice 26.2.5 released?
23 July 2026.

Q: Where can I download LibreOffice 26.2.5?
From https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: What has changed with Skia rendering in LibreOffice 26.2.5?
Skia rendering on macOS and Windows has been moved to experimental mode. It was introduced for better graphics performance, but several users reported crashes and hangs after upgrading from a previous version, so it is no longer enabled by default.

Q: Do I need to update if I use LibreOffice 25.8?
Yes. LibreOffice 25.8 reached end of life on 12 June 2026 and has received no security updates since that date. Users of 25.8.x should update to 26.2.5.

Q: Is LibreOffice 25.8 still supported?
No. It reached end of life on 12 June 2026.

Q: Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.2.5 support?
Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: What is the next version of LibreOffice after 26.2.5?
The Document Foundation will announce LibreOffice 26.8 in late August 2026, and LibreOffice 26.2.6 in early September 2026.

Q: Where can I find the full list of fixes in LibreOffice 26.2.5?
RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.5/RC1 — RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.5/RC2

Q …

Love LibreOffice? Got a passion for marketing, media, public relations and creating great campaigns? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture, and bringing new people with fresh ideas into our project.

To help to raise awareness of LibreOffice and support the marketing community with its work, we are looking for a Marketing and Communication Professional, to start as soon as possible.

Here’s what you’ll do

• Work with our graphics design agencies and create content showcasing new and updated features in LibreOffice (blog posts, social media posts, videos, website pages…)
• Draft and edit press releases and cross-channel content
• Work directly with the senior communications lead on the strategic side: media relations, campaigns, and texts that carry TDF’s positioning
• Improve media relations with EU and policy press, along with the FOSS and technology press
• Maintain the press-contact database and mailing lists
• Media monitoring, coverage tracking, and basic reporting
• Edit contributed and translated texts from our wider marketing community
• Track the effects and results of marketing campaigns on downloads and donations
• Logistical coordination of event communication

What we want from you

The role is built around a two-year trajectory: full operational ownership from the start, and a growing share of strategic work as the senior lead reduces involvement through 2028. The person we are looking for is reliable and largely self-directed on operational work; collaborative and open on the strategic side, where TDF’s positioning is developed jointly during the transition. Someone who genuinely wants to grow into a strategic communications role, and is content to build toward it steadily rather than assume it on arrival.

• Excellent communication skills, especially in written English
• Working fluency in at least one other major European language; more is a clear advantage
• A journalistic or public-relations instinct: a feel for what makes news, an ear for what a reporter will actually use, and either an existing network of press contacts or the demonstrated ability to build one
• The ability to adapt communications across different channels: the TDF blog, social media, Reddit etc. – while maintaining a consistent style and tone
• Good team-playing abilities

Familiarity with free software, open standards, and the digital-sovereignty debate is welcome, but not essential. This can be learned in the role, and genuine curiosity about it matters more than prior expertise. Also beneficial is experience in a non-profit, foundation, or other mission-driven organisation.

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 …

Members – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills, whether on a voluntary or paid basis. Members can vote for the Board of Directors (BoD) and the Membership Committee (MC), and also nominate themselves for a position in the BoD and the MC. Oh, and they get @libreoffice.org email addresses as well!

Let’s welcome our new members:

• Aleksi Kallio
• Brandon Evangelista
• Damiano Perri
• Karl-Heinz Gruner
• Mihai Alexandru Vasiliu
• Neil Roberts
• Robert Pearson
• Rohan Singh

Glad to have you on board, and thanks for being in the project Everyone who contributes in the LibreOffice and Document Liberation projects can apply to be a member too. Join us!

We are releasing the quarterly updated State of the Project Slide Deck, based on data from July 1st, 2025, to June 30, 2026, extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository.

During the 12 months 309 developers worked on the source code, adding 11.464 new commits (Git): 238 volunteer developers (77%) provided 2.028 commits (18%); 11 developers from The Document Foundation (4%) provided 4.501 commits (39%), and 60 developers from 8 ecosystem companies (19%) provided 4.935 commits (47%).

The slide deck is also a tribute to the 20 top Git committers, the 20 top Gerrit committers, the top 20 Bugzilla issue submitters, the top 20 people answering on Discourse, and the top 20 translator on Weblate. To all of them and to all the other contributors, thank you.

Looking at donations and downloads, the trend during the first six months of 2026 confirms the positive trend started in early 2025. Donation figures refer to the number of transactions and not to their amount, which is available via the ledgers published on The Document Foundation website.

You are invited to look at the slides, and download the file to compare it with the previous slide deck published in January and April. The next slide deck which will be available in October and will cover the 12 months between October 1st, 2025, and September 30, 2026.

We have started to publish these slide decks in January 2026, to provide a transparent overview about the progress of the project through some of the most significant measures of development, downloads and donations data collected by the marketing team at TDF.

In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question: if open standards are so beneficial, why aren’t they universally adopted?

The answer, in the case of document formats, lies in a single page produced by Microsoft Office. Getting rid of it is harder than it seems.

A file is never just a file

When you save a document on your computer, you are choosing a format — that is, the language in which your document is written in a way that the computer can understand: the set of rules that determines how words, tables, images and formatting instructions are stored and, consequently, how they can be retrieved, shared and read in the future.

For decades, the dominant format for office documents has been that produced by Microsoft Office. Initially as binary files with extensions such as DOC and XLS, then as XML-based formats introduced with Office 2007: DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. These formats are used by hundreds of millions of people. They are the lingua franca of offices, schools, public administrations and courts around the world.

Furthermore, in significant and decisive ways, they are proprietary — meaning they belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft’s interests in ways that may not align with the interests of users.

Understanding how all this works — and why it matters far beyond mere matters of software preference — is the aim of this article.

The architecture of dependency

Proprietary formats create dependency through a mechanism that is simple in principle and extraordinarily effective in practice: they make the data contained in a document inseparable from the software used to create it.

This is not a law of physics, but a design choice.

An open format — a format whose specifications are published, freely available and implementable by any software without restrictions — stores information in such a way that any compliant application can read, write and reproduce it faithfully.

A proprietary format, by contrast, may contain undocumented features, private extensions or behaviours that only the original software implements correctly. The document may be opened by other applications, but it cannot always be reproduced faithfully.

The practical consequence is familiar to anyone who has tried to open a Microsoft Office document in another application: the formatting becomes distorted, bullet points shift, tables lose their proportions, and headings appear different.

A presentation that looked polished in PowerPoint seems slapdash in a different viewer: the content is all there, whilst the document, strictly speaking, is not.

This is “lock-in”: it is not a padlock, it is not a technical ban, it is not a contractual restriction, but a silent and persistent friction that makes any work outside the Microsoft ecosystem seem slightly off, slightly unreliable, slightly unprofessional — and ensures that the easiest route is to return …

This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community.

TDF exists because of a large, dynamic global community — volunteers, ecosystem companies and committed end users who support our work with donations of both time and money. The 2025 accounts tell a clear story: a foundation that grew significantly, while keeping its finances transparent and its spending tied to its mission.

A year of strong growth in income

Total income for 2025 reached € 2,175,997, a substantial increase on the € 1,387,589 recorded in 2024. The growth came from three distinct sources, and it is worth being precise about each.

The largest share, € 1,976,825, came from donations — overwhelmingly from individual users and small businesses, mostly in Europe. This was the fifth consecutive year in which donations exceeded one million euro, and the highest figure to date. Part of this increase was organic, reflecting the continued strength of LibreOffice downloads. A further part can be attributed to a concrete change: in mid-2025 we introduced a new in-product update notification on Windows, which periodically — after every major release and selected minor ones — informs users that an update is available, presents the new features, and invites them to support the project with a donation. The effect was immediately visible as a step-up in donations from the moment it was deployed, and it is keeping donations at a higher level into 2026. We mention this openly, because transparency about *why* the numbers move is as important as the numbers themselves.

The second source was income from the sale of LibreOffice through online stores, sponsoring and related commercial activity, which together generated € 168,975. The Apple App Store (€ 118,942) and the Microsoft Store (€ 35,393) accounted for most of this. The third source was € 30,197 in income from securities held under the foundation’s asset management.

How the money was spent

Total expenditure for 2025 was € 1,457,343. The breakdown by category shows where donor money goes.

• Staff and operations remained by far the largest commitment, at € 1,091,032. This covers salaries (€ 406,736), statutory social security contributions (€ 93,244) and freelancers (€ 591,052) — the people who keep infrastructure, communication, administration and project coordination running, in order to share knowledge, support the community in its activities, and enable contributors to do their work.
• Tenders. As in 2024, no development tenders were funded in 2025. Tenders related to LibreOffice development remain on hold, and will be resumed based on the development strategy currently under discussion according to the new Procurement Policy.
• Events and community support amounted to roughly € 87,000, including the LibreOffice Conference (developer conference, € 51,184), community projects (€ 15,014) and student scholarships (€ 17,368), together with marketing initiatives. These funds support the events and local activities that hold the global community together, and help us to share knowledge around the world.
• Infrastructure and hosting came to € 51,420, covering the hosting, virtual machines, services …

You arrive in a city you have never visited before. You are tired. You find your room, open your suitcase, pull out a charger, and plug it into the wall. The small green light comes on. You think nothing of it, because nothing happened. You moved between two countries, two electrical grids, two regulatory regimes, and the machine in your hand simply continued to work.

Behind that uneventful moment sits more than a century of meetings, arguments, technical drawings, and compromises between people who will never meet you. The plug fits because somebody, somewhere, decided that it should – and decided further that the decision should be written down, made public, and not owned by anyone. We almost never notice this kind of work. We only notice it when it fails: the adapter that does not fit, the document that does not open, the part that cannot be replaced. Standards are the infrastructure we live inside, and like most infrastructure, they are invisible until they are not.

The public agreement

A standard is a public agreement about how things should fit together. Two words in that sentence carry the weight: public and agreement. Public, because the rules are written down and anyone can read them. Agreement, because nobody imposes them alone; they are negotiated between parties who accept that the shared space is more valuable than any individual advantage within it.

This distinguishes a standard from two things it is often confused with. It is not a law, because no state enforces it directly. And it is not a product, because no company owns it. A standard sits in a peculiar middle ground – it is something that belongs to everyone and to no one, maintained by institutions whose only task is to keep it coherent and accessible. The metric system is a standard. So is the size of a sheet of A4 paper, the shape of a stop sign, the gauge of a railway track, the dimensions of a shipping container. None of these things were inevitable. Each of them was once contested, and each of them was resolved not by conquest but by convention.

A civic act, not a technical one

It is tempting to treat standards as a matter for engineers. They are not. Or rather, they are only incidentally so. The engineering is the easy part. The hard part is the decision that the rules of a shared space should not belong to any single actor – that the measurement of length, the width of a road, the voltage in a socket should be held in common rather than owned.

The history of standards is, almost without exception, a history of fragmentation followed by painful consolidation. In the nineteenth century, European railways had dozens of incompatible track gauges, because each company built its own. Goods had to be unloaded and reloaded at every border, and sometimes at every regional boundary. The loss was enormous, and it was eventually resolved not because engineers invented a better track but because societies …

This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community.

Across the reporting period, the public conversation about office software and document formats shifted decisively. The justification for moving away from proprietary suites is no longer framed primarily as cost saving. It is framed as the preservation of independence — the ability of a government to act without asking permission from a foreign supplier. Several of the year’s migrations were announced with that argument stated explicitly and the cost argument set aside; the Austrian Armed Forces went so far as to say the move was not about money at all.

This reframing matters for The Document Foundation, because it moves the debate onto ground where the Foundation has argued for two decades. Digital sovereignty is the ability of nations, organisations and individuals to control their own digital destiny: to control access to their own information without depending on third parties, to make technological choices based on their own needs rather than a vendor’s commercial strategy, and to preserve that self-determination as the market consolidates. When public bodies store their documents in proprietary formats controlled by a single company, they surrender part of that sovereignty.

The year also clarified a distinction the foundation has long insisted on: sovereignty is not delivered by any single layer of the technology stack. It requires an open standard format at the base, an open source application above it, open source infrastructure for data location, and a legislative framework that defines the requirements. A law favouring open source, an open cloud, and an open suite together still leave sovereignty incomplete if the document format itself remains under one vendor’s control. The format is the foundation of the stack, and it is the layer most often overlooked.

The year’s central policy development was Germany’s formal commitment to ODF, a decision whose full weight became apparent only as it moved from principle toward binding implementation.

Germany’s IT Planning Council commits to ODF (April 2025)

In April 2025, Germany’s IT Planning Council — a seventeen-member body representing the federal government and the state governments — committed to moving public administration to the Open Document Format, with the stated aim of making ODF the standard for document exchange by 2027. The Council framed open formats and open interfaces as a necessary building block of public-sector transformation toward digital sovereignty, and commissioned its Standardization Board to implement the decision. The commitment set a clear trajectory: a federal-level decision, binding on the implementing board, with a 2027 target for ODF as the standard for document exchange. Its translation into concrete, enforceable infrastructure standards was expected to follow — and the early signs as the year closed pointed toward exactly that outcome.

• Source: TDF Community Blog, 29 April 2025
• Underlying decision (IT-Planungsrat, in German)

ODF v1.4 approved as an OASIS Standard (December 2025)

On 3 December 2025, OASIS Open approved ODF v1.4 as an OASIS Standard — the …

Earlier in this series I described the invisible architecture of lock-in as three stacked layers. A document depends on its format, which depends on a rendering engine to become visible, which depends on the fonts that give it its final shape. Each layer is a dependency the user rarely sees and almost never chooses deliberately, and together they explain why “just open it in something else” so often fails. The argument has always been structural rather than moral: it does not matter whether the vendor is benevolent or predatory, because the dependency exists either way.

Two pieces of news from late June give me occasion to extend that architecture. They are not, at first glance, about formats at all. But read structurally, they reveal two further layers of dependency that sit on top of the technical ones. Layers I left implicit until now because the technical case was enough to make the point. It is worth making them explicit, because they complete the account of what dependency actually means.

The first piece of news: Microsoft has extended free security updates for Windows 10 by a further year, to October 2027. The original end date for consumer support was October 2026. Hundreds of millions of users, and the institutions that manage them, had organised their procurement, their budgets, and their migration planning around that date. Then the date moved, quietly, through an editor’s note appended to a blog post, with no formal announcement.

The second: Italy’s competition authority, the AGCM, has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft adequately informed consumers when it integrated its Copilot and Designer AI tools into Microsoft 365 and moved subscribers onto more expensive plans. The allegation, still under investigation, concerns transparency and consent: whether users were given a genuine choice, or were migrated to a costlier tier unless they actively opted out.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to treat these as two instances of the same thing, and they are not. They are two sides of one coin. A coin has two faces and a single substance. The substance, in both cases, is that the user is not in control of his desktop stack. The faces are different, and naming them precisely is what gives the argument its force.

The temporal layer

The Windows 10 extension is not, on its surface, bad news. A further year of free security updates is, taken in isolation, a gift to users who cannot or will not upgrade. If you read the story as a tale of corporate character – Microsoft breaking its word, Microsoft flip-flopping – you reach for the weakest version of the argument, and you hand a critic the easy reply that extending support is pro-consumer.

The structural reading is harder to answer. The point is not that the date was wrong, or that moving it was wrong. The point is that the date was never yours. The lifecycle of your own desktop – when it is supported, when it is abandoned, when …

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

• We started by announcing LibreOffice 26.2.4, the fourth bugfix update to the current stable branch of the suite.

• Throughout the month, we continued our blog post series looking at Open Document Format (ODF), Microsoft’s OOXML, and vendor lock-in: A Standard in Name Only: What OOXML Transitional Tells Us About Format Sovereignty; Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF; and The invisible architecture of lock-in – the layering of dependencies.

• Our marketing and design communities worked on a new video: Join the LibreOffice Community! (This video is also available on PeerTube.)

• Then we posted sections from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2025: LibreOffice releases, features, QA and accessibility; LibreOffice Marketing Activities; LibreOffice Downloads and Donations in 2025; and LibreOffice Conference and External Events.

• Finally, the the documentation community announced the LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 26.2.

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