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.

Like what we do? Support LibreOffice with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better! Also keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook.

There is a sophisticated mechanism by which proprietary technology ecosystems maintain their grip on users and institutions, even when those users and institutions believe they are making free choices, using open standards, and building independent digital infrastructure.

The mechanism does not work through force, but through a subtler and more durable strategy: the layering of dependencies, in which each layer obscures the one beneath it, so that when the system fails the apparent cause is something other than the real one.

It is a structural pattern with identifiable components and predictable failure modes, and with a single political consequence: the systematic attribution of interoperability failures to open alternatives rather than to the proprietary dependencies that actually cause them.

Understanding all of this is essential for anyone working on a genuine interoperability policy, because without it even the best-intentioned policy interventions address the visible symptom while leaving untouched the larger problem of the underlying architecture, which goes on working exactly as designed.

The perception of malfunction

Let us start from the user’s experience, because this is where the political damage occurs.

A document is created in Microsoft Word and sent to a colleague who uses LibreOffice on a Linux desktop. The colleague opens the file. Something is wrong: a table has shifted, the text has reflowed, a font looks different, the page breaks have moved.

The experience is familiar to millions of people in institutional settings that have adopted, or are considering adopting, open source software. It is the experience that generates the helpdesk tickets, the emails of pure frustration to the IT department, the conversations that end with “can you just send me a PDF?”, and the broader sentiment, consolidating over time, that open source software is not ready for professional use.

What is the cause of this failure? Users will blame LibreOffice, IT managers will blame format incompatibility, policymakers will blame the immaturity of open standards.

These are all wrong answers. Or rather, they are all answers to the wrong question, because they describe where the failure manifests rather than where it originates.

The actual cause is a set of interdependent technical systems, each contributing a different failure mode, all producing a single visible result.

The format contains proprietary structures that only Microsoft’s implementation handles correctly. The rendering introduces platform-dependent variations that the format specification does not control. The proprietary fonts cannot be legally bundled with open source software.

Three distinct failure modes producing the same symptom, and equally invisible to the user, who perceives only that things worked in Word and do not work in LibreOffice.

This is the architecture of layered dependency. Each layer absorbs the causal chain and emits a different signal, one that points toward the open alternative.

Layer One: the format and its hidden features

The first layer is the most discussed and the most politically visible: the document format. The conflict between ODF and OOXML has been extensively documented, litigated within standards bodies, and debated in national parliaments and in the …

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

In 2025, The Document Foundation and the global LibreOffice community pursued a marketing and advocacy programme that combined the established work of community building and software promotion with a sharpened public argument about digital sovereignty and open document standards. The year was framed by two anchoring milestones — LibreOffice’s fifteenth anniversary and the passing of 400 million cumulative downloads — and by an increasingly explicit defence of the Open Document Format as the only open standard for office documents. What follows is a thematic overview of the major activities carried out in support of TDF and LibreOffice over the course of the year, grouped by area rather than reported month by month.

Anniversary and Adoption Milestones

Two milestones gave the year its public narrative.

In January, TDF announced that LibreOffice had surpassed 400 million cumulative downloads since 2011, with an average of 28.6 million downloads per year and an upward trend reaching over 35 million annual downloads. The announcement reaffirmed the project’s standing against the long-running narrative that the desktop office suite was destined to disappear into the cloud.

In September, the project celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of LibreOffice, launched on 28 September 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice. The anniversary was treated not merely as a software birthday but as a statement about the movement LibreOffice represents: a community of thousands of contributors and dozens of companies, localisation into more than 120 languages reaching billions of potential users, and a sustained argument for digital autonomy in an era of cloud lock-in and disappearing ownership. The communication tied the milestone directly to ODF as the guarantee of perpetual, transparent control over one’s own documents.

Advocacy: Digital Sovereignty and Open Standards

The most distinctive development of 2025 was the consolidation of marketing into a coherent advocacy campaign around digital sovereignty and open document standards.

The end of Windows 10 support, scheduled for 14 October 2025, provided the central advocacy occasion. TDF backed the international @endof10 campaign and argued that the moment was a crossroads rather than a routine product transition, positioning Linux and LibreOffice as a privacy-respecting, future-proof alternative to a forced upgrade path toward Windows 11 and Microsoft 365, with their attendant subscription costs, cloud dependency, and hardware obsolescence.

Alongside this, the foundation built a body of technical and policy-oriented material making the case for ODF as the only open standard for office documents and exposing the structural problems of OOXML. This advocacy strand reframed the project’s communication from product promotion toward a public argument about format ownership, lock-in, and institutional control of documents — an argument that resonated strongly with public-sector and policy audiences.

Conferences and Major Events

International and regional conferences remained central to the foundation’s visibility.

The annual LibreOffice Conference 2025 was the flagship gathering of contributors — developers, designers, documentation writers, translators, and marketers — and was promoted across the project’s channels in …

This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. More will be posted soon…

Donations

In 2025, The Document Foundation received 140,593 donation transactions, for a total of €1,807,780 net of payment processing and currency conversion charges. This represents a substantial increase over the two preceding years: donation transactions had numbered 98,361 in 2023 and 104,430 in 2024, while the corresponding amounts were €1,302,956 and €1,387,589. Transaction volume therefore grew by approximately 35% year on year, and the cleaned total rose by roughly 30%.

A note on methodology is useful here. The charts in this section report the number of donation transactions rather than the amounts received. This is deliberate: the financial figure can be established only after each transaction has been cleaned by subtracting conversion charges and processing fees, whereas the transaction count is known directly. The charts therefore describe the shape of the trend, while the euro totals given above represent the financial reality behind it.

The quarterly distribution shows that the year’s growth was strongly concentrated in its final months. The first three quarters each built modestly on the last, and the fourth quarter rose well above them. This Q4 surge has a clear explanation. The announcement of LibreOffice 25.8 in August was followed by the introduction of a new update mechanism on Windows, which presents users with a dedicated new-features page and an invitation to support the project. This combination proved markedly effective in converting attention into contributions. The growing public interest in European digital sovereignty over the course of 2025 may have provided additional, favourable context, but the measurable drivers were the release and the new update mechanism.

Downloads

LibreOffice was downloaded 44,809,742 times in 2025 from the official download page, and the year recorded the highest annual figure in the project’s history. The per-year chart shows steady growth across more than a decade; the 2019 figure is shown but should be read with caution, as automated traffic distorted the counts that year. Rather than omit it, the Foundation has chosen to publish a credible corrected number and to state openly that it cannot be fully trusted.

These download figures should be understood as a floor rather than a ceiling. Several large channels fall outside the count entirely: most Linux users obtain LibreOffice through their distributions, installations from the Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store are not recorded, and the new Windows update mechanism means that a user may download the software once and subsequently update it without generating a further download. Actual usage is therefore considerably higher than the download total alone suggests.

Viewed month by month, downloads remained consistently strong throughout the year, with 2025 ahead of both 2023 and 2024 in most months. The pattern shows no single dominant spike but rather a sustained level of demand, consistent with LibreOffice’s established position rather than …

This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. More will be posted soon…

LibreOffice Conference

The LibreOffice Conference was the annual get-together of the worldwide LibreOffice community, bringing together developers, contributors, and users. The 2025 event was held in Budapest, Hungary, from September 3 to 5, and was preceded by a community session.

The main conference featured 53 sessions spread over three days. It kicked off with a welcome and housekeeping session, followed by an opening speech from Eliane Domingos from TDF’s Board of Directors, and a welcome speech from the university that hosted the event.

After that, the talks began across several different tracks, including the Open Document Format, advocacy and marketing, development and extensions, UX and design, and more. The full list of talks can be found on https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2025/schedule/. There was also a notable talk from the Austrian military (Bundesheer) about their migration to LibreOffice and the new features they funded.

The event finished on Friday with a lightning talks session, followed by the closing address and a celebration for the 15th anniversary of LibreOffice. But the conference was more than just talks: there was a community dinner as well.

Now the community is looking forward to 2026’s LibreOffice Conference. The event will take place in Pordenone, northern Italy, from September 10 to 12, and the Call for Papers is currently open.

In addition to the main LibreOffice Conference, there was the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2025, which took place in Tokyo, Japan, from December 13 – 14. Speakers and guests from around the world discussed topics specific to Asian communities, such as complex text layout (CTL) and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support, and marketing LibreOffice in specific countries.

There was also the sixth edition of the Latin American LibreOffice Congress, held in Habana, Cuba, from October 6 to 9. LibreOffice project activities was concentrated on the opening day, October 6, and in the special session “LibreOffice Congress and Technological Sovereignty”, on the 8th. With the remaining days available, the organisers articulated a parallel agenda of activities, with visits and strategic meetings with managers and professionals from governmental and community areas.

TDF at External Events

Throughout 2025, members of The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community attended many other events around the world. The first big event was FOSDEM, held in Brussels in early February – the biggest meetup of free and open source software developers in Europe. As usual, the LibreOffice community was present with a stand, merchandise, stickers, flyers, clothing and more. Attendees came by to talk about the project, report issues and make suggestions.

In late April, the Augsburger …