The question arises naturally for anyone who chooses the standard format over the proprietary one: why do office suites that use OOXML as their native format handle ODF in ways that range from poor to appalling?

The two most obvious answers are these: vendors have neglected the format, treating it as an afterthought, or they are quietly working to discredit the very idea of transparent interoperability, through support so bad that it demonstrates the format “does not work”.

Both answers are too simplistic. The reality is that three distinct mechanisms are at work, applying to different vendors in different proportions and ultimately converging on the same outcome.

A challenge that is not a challenge

Reading and writing ODF faithfully, in isolation, is genuinely feasible: the format is completely and openly specified, and there is no equivalent of OOXML’s notorious legacy compatibility flags, which refer to undocumented behaviours of old Microsoft products that only Microsoft can reproduce.

A competent development team is able to implement ODF correctly on the basis of the ODF specification alone.

An office suite, however, does not implement a format in isolation: it has an internal, in-memory representation of the document. Loading a document is a mapping into that representation, and saving a document is a mapping out of it.

Fidelity is greatest when the internal model is congruent with the document format. LibreOffice’s model is essentially ODF, which is why, in this context, ODF is genuinely native.

When a suite’s internal model has the shape of OOXML, ODF stops being native and becomes an external import that must be converted to and from a representation built for a different format.

Take an ODF feature that OOXML lacks: the ODP field that displays the total number of slides. The instructive part is that the information itself is not missing from a PPTX file. The package enumerates every slide, and the count is available to any program that opens it. What OOXML provides no way to express is the statement that this number is the total. There is a field for the current slide number and none for the count, and Microsoft’s own guidance is to type the figure into a text box and keep it up to date by hand, which is a precise description of not having a field at all. Every published workaround is a macro or an add-in that computes the number once and writes it out as fixed text.

So when an ODP file carrying that field is opened in an OOXML-based editor, what is lost is not the data but the instruction. The number survives. The fact that it was calculated does not, and from that moment the document no longer knows how long it is.

The reverse direction fails more quietly, and therefore worse. A slide count exported from Impress to PPTX has to be written out as fixed text, so the presentation is correct on the day it is converted and wrong the first time a …

On 13 October 2026, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021. No more security updates, no more fixes, no more assurances. The software will still launch. It will still open your files. But from that date it becomes a liability rather than an asset — and the only sanctioned path forward runs through a subscription.

This is not a bug in the model. It is the model.

Support that does not expire

LibreOffice has no end-of-support date, because there is no vendor with the power to declare one. The code is public. The development is community-driven and foundation-governed. When a release cycle closes, the next one is already available, free, to everyone — not to those who renewed.

The distinction matters more than it appears. Microsoft’s lifecycle policy is a commercial instrument: the date is chosen, not discovered. It marks the moment when continuing to use software you paid for becomes unwise, and it exists to convert perpetual licences into recurring revenue. LibreOffice cannot issue such a date because no one holds the authority to issue it.

Ownership of documents, not just access to them

A support deadline is the visible layer. Underneath it sits something more consequential: the format your documents are written in.

LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO standard maintained by OASIS and implemented by multiple independent applications. The specification is public, complete, and readable. Anyone can write software that opens an ODF file correctly — today, or in forty years, using tools that have not yet been written.

OOXML, despite carrying an ISO number, is not comparable in practice. The standard that was approved and the format that Microsoft Office actually writes have diverged. Independent implementations remain approximations. This is why round-tripping a complex document between suites degrades it, and why the degradation is always the fault of the software that did not write the format in the first place.

The consequence is simple. If your archive is in OOXML, your ability to read it depends on a commercial relationship with a single company continuing indefinitely. If your archive is in ODF, it does not.

Documents are software

A modern document is not a page. It is a structured artefact: markup, style definitions, embedded objects, references to fonts, scripts, conditional logic, external data. It is executed by an application in exactly the way a program is executed by a runtime.

We accepted decades ago that critical software should not be built on formats and interfaces controlled by a single vendor. Documents have escaped that scrutiny only because they look like paper. They are not paper. The same argument that makes open standards essential for software makes them essential for the files that record contracts, medical histories, legislation, research, and institutional memory.

Costs that stop compounding

The licence saving is real but it is the least interesting part of the calculation. What changes structurally is the removal of a recurring, unilaterally repriceable line item from the budget — one that has risen repeatedly and will rise again, because the …

Digital sovereignty is not about owning everything, it is about ensuring that nothing essential can be taken away.

That single line settles more arguments than it first appears to, because it disqualifies the two positions that dominate the debate. One side imagines sovereignty as control. The other imagines it as choice. Both are talking about something real, and both have mistaken a part for the whole.

The control camp misreads the goal

The instinct to equate sovereignty with control is understandable. Sovereignty, in its older political sense, was control: borders, currency, the monopoly on force. So when the word migrates into the digital domain, people reach for the same picture: own the servers, hold the data, build the stack, depend on no one.

The trouble is that this picture is both impossible and beside the point.

It is impossible because no institution, and certainly no continent, is going to reimplement the entire computing stack from silicon upward. The dream of total self-sufficiency is not sovereignty, it is autarky, and autarky has failed everywhere it has been seriously attempted.

A Europe that tried to own everything would spend a generation rebuilding inferior versions of things that already work, and would be no freer at the end of it.

But the deeper problem is that control is the wrong target even when it is achievable. An institution can own the building and still be a tenant of the lock.

A public administration can run its own data centre, on its own soil, under its own staff, and still find that every document it produces is hostage to a format only one vendor fully understands. The hardware is sovereign. The institution is not. Control over the container tells you nothing about who controls the contents.

This is why the control framing quietly concedes the argument before it begins. It accepts that sovereignty is about what you hold, and so it can always be answered with “but you cannot hold all of it”, which is true, and which is why the framing loses. Sovereignty was never about the holding.

The choice camp misreads the threat

The opposite error is more fashionable and, for that reason, more dangerous.

Here the argument runs: sovereignty simply means freedom to choose. A sovereign buyer surveys the market and selects the best tool for the job, and if the best tool happens to be proprietary, so be it. To exclude proprietary software on principle, this camp says, is itself a kind of unfreedom, an ideology dressed up as independence. Real sovereignty, they insist, is vendor-neutral.

It is a seductive argument because it borrows the language of liberty. But it confuses a choice made today with a choice that remains available tomorrow, and that confusion is the whole game.

Consider what “choosing” a proprietary, closed-format platform actually buys you.

On the day of purchase, you have exercised your freedom: you compared options and picked one. But every document, every workflow, every trained habit that follows accumulates inside a system that …

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 …