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 …

When The Document Foundation was announced sixteen years ago, some people found the name a little flat. It didn’t sparkle. It named an object — the document — rather than a product, a movement, or an aspiration. Today, that same name is worth a second look, because it turns out to have pointed at exactly the place the digital sovereignty debate would eventually arrive.

To see why, it helps to ask a simple question: when you are locked into a piece of software, where does the lock actually live?

The intuitive answer is “in the application.” You feel trapped by the program — its menus, its habits, the licence you keep renewing. But the application is replaceable. You can install a different one tomorrow. What you cannot so easily replace is your documents — the years of contracts, records, reports, and correspondence you have produced. And if those documents are saved in a format that only one company’s software can fully read, then the lock was never really in the application at all. It was in the file.

This is the quiet mechanism behind most document lock-in. The format does the trapping. As long as your organisation’s memory is stored in a format controlled by a single vendor, you depend on that vendor to read your own past — and that dependency does not end when you switch programs, because the documents come with you.

This is also why “digital sovereignty” is not, at root, a question about geography or about which company you buy from. It is a question about control: whether you, and not a supplier, hold the keys to your own information over time. An organisation that cannot open its own archives without permission is not sovereign over them, wherever it happens to be located.

The answer is older and simpler than the debate that has grown up around it: open document standards. A document saved in an open, fully published format — one any software can implement, today or in fifty years — belongs to the person who wrote it, not to the company whose program happened to create it. The format stops being a lock and becomes what it should always have been: a neutral container for your own words.

The name said this all along. It put the document at the centre, because the document is where the question is decided. Sixteen years on, the rest of the conversation is catching up — and we have only just begun to scratch the surface.

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest Getting Started Guide, updated for LibreOffice 26.2!

The Documentation Team is proud to present this new edition, designed to help users with an introductory guide of LibreOffice, covering all aspects of the best open source free office suite, from word processing to databases as well as settings and configuration common to all modules.

Writer (word processing)
Calc (spreadsheets)
Impress (presentations)
Draw (vector graphics)
Math (formula editor)
Base (database management)

This guide is part of our growing collection of documentation — lovingly written, edited, and reviewed by a global team of dedicated volunteers who are passionate about open-source software and digital freedom.

The 26.2 update was coordinated by Dione Maddern, with valuable contributions from Peter Schofield and Olivier Hallot. A huge thanks to everyone involved!

Dione Maddern – Guide Coordinator

Ready to dive in? Download the guide for free from the LibreOffice Bookshelf Project.

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…

Releases of the Year

LibreOffice’s release plan works on a time-based release schedule, with major updates every six months (typically in February and August). So in other words, there are two new versions of LibreOffice per year. Many other FOSS projects adopt a similar time-based approach, and since 2024, LibreOffice has used a “year.month” versioning scheme – so LibreOffice 25.2, for instance, was released in the second month (February) of 2025. This versioning scheme helps users to see how old (or new) their currently installed version of LibreOffice is.

In addition to the major upgrades, there were monthly smaller “point” releases, mainly fixing bugs, compatibility issues and security vulnerabilities.

Major Feature Highlights

LibreOffice 25.2 was released on February 6. It introduced the ability to read and write ODF version 1.4, alongside numerous interoperability improvements with proprietary OOXML documents. It became possible to automatically sign documents after defining a default certificate. Additionally, Windows 7 and 8/8.1 were designated as deprecated platforms, with support scheduled to be removed in version 25.8, and extensions and features relying on Python ceased to work on Windows 7.

In LibreOffice Writer 25.2, improvements were made to Track Changes management to better handle a large number of changes in long documents. Comments were tracked in the Navigator when the focus was moved into them, while resizing the area containing comments showed a visual guide. Options were added to set a default zoom level for opening documents, which overrode the level stored within the documents themselves. It also became possible to delete all content of a specific content type, excluding headings, via the Navigator.

In LibreOffice Calc 25.2, a “Handle Duplicate Records” dialog was added to select or remove duplicate records. Both the Function Wizard dialog and the Functions Sidebar deck received improvements to searching and user experience. Solver models could be saved into spreadsheets, and the Solver became able to provide a sensitivity analysis report. New sheet protection options were also added relating to Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts, and AutoFilters.

Furthermore, many improvements were made to all Impress templates, which received visible elements, such as the font colour being set to black, in Master Notes and Handout. Objects could be centred on the Impress slide or Draw page in a single step, and the automatic repeating of slides could be activated in windowed mode. Finally, overflowing text in presenter notes was no longer cut off when printing.

Meanwhile, LibreOffice 25.8 was released on August 20. It brought new performance and features to the …

LibreOffice is the free, private, open source office suite – and successor to OpenOffice. It’s made by a worldwide community, and you can be part of it! Boost your skillset, learn new people, and have fun – find out what you can do for LibreOffice.

(This video is also available on PeerTube.)