The Document Foundation Planet

Marius Popa Adrian: Announcing node-firebird v2.6.0: TypeScript 7, Query Cancellation, Firebird 6.0 Support, and More

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:05:20 +0000

We are thrilled to share the journey of our last 7 releases (from v2.3.3 to v2.6.0), which mark one of the most transformative periods in the history of the node-firebird driver. With this series of releases, we’ve migrated the driver to native TypeScript 7, implemented native Promise & async/await APIs, added support for Firebird 5.0 and 6.0 features,

Official TDF Blog: Financials and Budget – TDF Annual Report 2025

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:59:16 +0000

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 and domains that underpin the project’s technical independence — a foundational asset we continue to prioritise.
Legal and administrative expenses totalled roughly € 92,000, including accounting and the preparation of financial statements (€ 34,164), legal advice and counselling (€ 36,597 across project and general legal work), and insurances (€ 4,626).

Cost of fundraising. Receiving donations is not free. In 2025, payment-processing and banking fees came to roughly € 98,000 — Stripe fees of € 46,446 and bank transfer and money-transfer fees of € 51,190. These are simply the cost of doing business: they scale with the volume of donations we receive. It is worth adding that these figures do not capture the full picture, because PayPal’s currency-conversion costs are embedded in the transactions and not separately visible — though they are comparable in scale to the Stripe fees. We report this plainly so that no reader underestimates what it costs to collect the donations that fund our work.

Results and transparency

After expenses, the charitable entity closed the year with a result of € 554,476, asset management contributed € 21,263, and the commercial business operations returned a profit of € 142,916.

Transparency remains one of TDF’s defining characteristics — towards our donors, contributors, community and users. Our accounting is handled by a professional accountant, and our complete ledgers, listing all income and spending broken down by project, are published on our public wiki at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers, with only a few items obfuscated for privacy. As in previous years, and given the scale the foundation has reached, our books have been audited, and the Board continues to work with the authorities in Berlin to implement the improvements the audit recommended.

To everyone who contributed time, skills, resources and money in 2025: thank you. The foundation’s strength is your achievement.

Note: The expense categories above are indicative groupings drawn from the foundation’s accounts. They exclude VAT flows and certain material costs that the ledger handles separately, so the categories are not intended to reconcile arithmetically with the per-sphere annual results. The authoritative, fully itemised figures are published in the ledgers.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – make a donation, or get involved and help our volunteers. Thank you!

Marius Popa Adrian: Working on new Firebird VS code extension , still work in progress

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:08:55 +0000
Not bad for a few days of work , There are still lot's of bugs and UI inconsistencies ps: It's a fork of existing extension but using updated node drivers and updated roadmap (Firebird 6 support / Typescript 6.x)pps: I need to recover my MFA Azure Developer account to publish it soon

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Lo que nos debemos unos a otros, en milímetros y voltios

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:14:01 +0000
por Italo Vignoli Llegas a una ciudad en la que nunca has estado. Estás cansado. Encuentras tu habitación, abres tu maleta, sacas un cargador y lo enchufas a la pared. Se enciende la pequeña luz verde. No le das importancia, porque no pasó nada. Pasaste de un país a otro,

Marius Popa Adrian: Going Native-Free: Introducing the Pure Node.js Wire Driver for Firebird

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:37:11 +0000
Going Native-Free: Introducing the Pure Node.js Wire Driver for Firebird Published in Engineering • Pull Request #168 Summary If you have ever built Node.js applications that communicate with a Firebird database, you are likely familiar with the standard setup routine. Traditionally, high-level drivers depended heavily on the native client library (

Official TDF Blog: What We Owe Each Other, in Millimetres and Volts

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:54:04 +0000

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 decided that the common good of interoperability was worth more than the private advantage of incompatibility. The same story repeats with screw threads, with time zones, with paper sizes, with electrical systems. Each consolidation was a political act dressed in technical clothing.

When we say a standard is public, then, we are saying something quite radical. We are saying that a certain category of rules – the ones that govern how we connect to each other – must be held outside the market, because if the market owns them, the market can charge rent on the simple act of cooperation.

What standards give us

From the point of view of the person who uses them – which is to say, all of us, every day – open standards provide three things that are easy to take for granted until they are gone.

The first is interchangeability. Because the rules are public, anyone can build to them. If the lamp you bought five years ago breaks, you can replace the bulb with one from any manufacturer. If your supplier raises prices unreasonably, you can switch to another. If a company goes out of business, its customers are not stranded. You are not captured by the choices you made in the past, because the choices were made against a common framework rather than inside a private one.

The second is continuity. What works today will still work tomorrow, and what was made yesterday still works today. This is a quieter gift, but it may be the most important one. A standard that is public and stable means that your past remains legible to you. The documents you wrote twenty years ago, the tools your grandfather used, the measurements recorded in an old building plan – all of these remain available, because the rules that governed them are still available. Continuity is how a society talks to itself across time. It is how we remain connected to what we have done and what has been done for us.

The third is shared ground. Standards let people who have made different choices still cooperate. You and I do not need to use the same brand, the same supplier, the same tool. We only need to agree on the interface between us. A standard is, in this sense, a kind of peace treaty – a recognition that a common format for exchange matters more than uniformity of preference. It is the opposite of a monoculture. It is the condition that makes plurality possible without chaos.

When the rules become private property

Now consider what happens when the rules of a shared space are privately owned.

Imagine that the thread on every screw in your country belonged to a single company, and that using a screw at all required permission from that company. Imagine that the gauge of the railway tracks was the property of one firm, and that every other operator had to pay to run trains on lines they did not own. Imagine that the voltage of the electrical grid was licensed, and that plugs from any other manufacturer simply did not fit.

The three goods we just described begin to erode. Interchangeability disappears, because you cannot replace one part with another without the owner’s permission. Continuity depends on the corporate survival of a single actor: if the company changes its terms, raises its prices, or goes bankrupt, you lose access not just to a product but to the entire category of things that depended on it. Shared ground shrinks until it includes only the people who have paid the same licence as you have. Cooperation becomes a privilege extended by a third party, rather than a right held between equals.

This sounds absurd when we imagine it happening to physical infrastructure. We would never accept it for screws or rails or electricity. And yet the history of standards is also the history of attempts to do exactly this, resisted successfully in some domains and less successfully in others. The reason we have open standards for physical infrastructure is not that anyone thought them obviously good. It is that societies fought, sometimes for decades, to keep them out of private hands.

The ancestor question

There is a useful way to think about all of this, which is to ask what kind of ancestor we want to be.

Every time we accept an open standard, we are making a small bet on behalf of people who do not yet exist. We are saying that the thing we are building – the document, the product, the system – should remain accessible to them, even though we will not be here to help them open it. We are choosing to be hospitable to a future we cannot see. And every time we accept a closed one, we are making the opposite bet. We are saying that our successors will have to rely on the continued goodwill of a private actor to reach back to what we have made. We are outsourcing their access to our own lives.

This is not a technical question. It is a civic one, and it is also a moral one. Standards are how a society decides whether its own infrastructure should be owned or shared, whether its past should be accessible or licensed, whether its future should be open or gated. They look like engineering. They are really a quiet, continuous answer to the question of what we owe each other, and what we owe to those who come after us.

So the next time you plug something into a wall and it simply works – the next time a door handle fits, a page prints cleanly, a part slots into place without thought – consider for a moment what had to be true for that to happen. Consider who refused to own it. And ask yourself what kind of ancestor a closed standard lets you be.

LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 26.8 Beta1 is available for testing

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:13:48 +0000
LibreOffice 26.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2026 ( Check the Release Plan ). LibreOffice 26.8 Beta1 is the second pre-release since development of version 26.8 started at the beginning of December, 2025. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 26.8 Alpha1, 445 commits have been submitted

Marius Popa Adrian: Practical Firebird Performance Diagnostics: A Structured Approach

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:35:57 +0000
IBPhoenix is pleased to announce the release of a new free ebook:Practical Firebird Performance Diagnostics: A Structured ApproachUnlike traditional performance tuning guides, this ebook focuses on the reasoning behind successful diagnostics. It introduces a structured framework that helps Firebird professionals move from observed symptoms to defensible explanations by classifying problems,

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Política y soberanía digital – Informe anual TDF de 2025

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:24:23 +0000
Esto forma parte del Informe Anual 2025 de The Document Foundation, la organización sin fines de lucro que coordina el proyecto y la comunidad de LibreOffice. A lo largo del período que abarca el informe, el debate público sobre el software de oficina y los formatos de documentos dio un

Official TDF Blog: Policy and Digital Sovereignty – TDF Annual Report 2025

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:38:29 +0000

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 organisation’s highest level of ratification — coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of ODF’s original adoption as an OASIS Standard. The new version maintains full backward compatibility while improving accessibility support (assistive technologies, decorative-object marking), professional formatting and visual design, and features for data analysis and technical documentation. It remains an XML-based, vendor-neutral, royalty-free format. Earlier ODF versions are published as ISO/IEC 26300; the four-part v1.4 specification is available in the OASIS library.

Source: TDF Community Blog, 3 December 2025

Twentieth anniversary of ODF standardisation

The year carried the twentieth-anniversary thread throughout: ODF’s adoption as an OASIS Standard in 2005, and its ISO/IEC standardisation on 3 May 2006. The ODF v1.4 ratification in December 2025 was deliberately timed to the OASIS anniversary. The anniversary is not merely commemorative: it underpins the argument that ODF is the only open standard for office documents with a twenty-year record governments can rely on for long-term archival access.

Open Document Format Campaign and Document Freedom Day

The Foundation ran a sustained ODF communications campaign through the year, built around a regular series of articles on the TDF blog. Rather than isolated announcements, the series formed a coherent body of work that moved from the fundamentals — what ODF is and why it matters — through technical and practical material on file types, compliance and interoperability, the differences between ODF and proprietary formats, migration guidance, and the new features of recent ODF versions, and on to the wider argument connecting open document standards to digital sovereignty. Taken together, the series gave the Foundation a standing reference resource and a consistent public voice on the format throughout the year.

Document Freedom Day was marked as a purely advocacy-driven occasion: blog posts, social media activity across the Foundation’s channels, and small local events organised by community members around the world. The emphasis was on awareness and outreach rather than on any single flagship event.

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Public Administrations Migrating to LibreOffice/ODF During the Year

The following migrations were publicly reported and verifiably advanced during 2025. Status reflects what the cited primary or most reliable source actually supports. Long-standing legacy deployments are deliberately excluded; this list is reserved for movement during the year, and only entries with solid sourcing are included. Figures and completion claims should be confirmed against TDF records before publication.

Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) — confirmed, substantially advanced

By early December 2025, the northern German state reported that close to 80% of administrative workstations outside the tax administration were running LibreOffice as the binding standard, with Microsoft Office and Outlook either already uninstalled or in the process of removal, and a new-licensing rate already well below 10%. The state reported licence-cost savings already exceeding €15 million, against a one-time 2026 migration investment of €9 million. The remaining ~20% of workstations depend on specialist applications with technical ties to Microsoft formats; migration paths for these, and for the tax administration, have been defined. In parallel, the state completed the migration of more than 40,000 mailboxes (over 100 million messages and calendar items) off Exchange/Outlook to Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird, with the cutover finishing 2 October 2025.

Schleswig-Holstein State Chancellery press release, 4 December 2025

Source: The Register, 15 October 2025 (email migration completion)

Austrian Armed Forces / Bundesheer — confirmed, completed in 2025

The Austrian military migrated approximately 16,000 workstations across all branches from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, with the project finalised in 2025 and Microsoft Office 2016 removed from all machines (Office 2024 LTSC retained only under special permission for legacy macro/Access cases). The Directorate 6 (ICT & Cyber) stated the primary driver was digital sovereignty and in-house data processing, explicitly not licence savings. The Bundesheer contributed more than five person-years of upstream development back to the LibreOffice project; the migration was presented at the LibreOffice Conference 2025 in Budapest.

Source: TDF Community Blog, 30 September 2025

Source: heise online, 18 September 2025

Denmark — Ministry of Digital Affairs — confirmed, phased, in progress

The Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs committed to replacing Microsoft 365/Office with LibreOffice, beginning July 2025 with a phased rollout (roughly half of staff in the summer, the remainder by autumn). For accuracy: earlier reporting that Denmark would abandon Windows for Linux entirely was subsequently corrected — Windows remains in use on many devices; the confirmed change is the office-suite migration. Several municipalities, including Copenhagen and Aarhus, were reported to be pursuing similar moves.

Source: Linux Journal, mid-2025 (with the Windows correction noted)

Threats to ODF Adoption and Digital Sovereignty

The year’s gains were real, but they sit alongside structural threats. The central risk is that the open-source application migrations succeed while the open format battle is quietly lost — that lock-in survives the move by relocating from the application to the document.

Format sovereignty as the overlooked layer

An office suite that does not use ODF as its native format handles ODF files imperfectly, which re-creates interoperability problems and pushes users back toward the proprietary format “for convenience.” A government can therefore adopt an open suite and an open cloud and still fail to achieve sovereignty if its documents remain in a format controlled by a single vendor. The format is the base of the stack; without it, every layer above is compromised.

The “ISO standard format” sleight of hand

When a public administration is told its documents are stored in “an ISO standard format,” the reasonable assumption is genuine openness. OOXML Transitional does not deliver it: its stacked dependencies — format, rendering and fonts — re-encode failure at each layer. A format named as a standard while defined by its own specification as provisional is the principal rhetorical obstacle to ODF adoption, and the principal target of the Foundation’s three-strand evidence work.

Initiatives that default to OOXML under a sovereignty banner

A specific and growing risk is the European sovereignty initiative that adopts open source applications and open infrastructure while defaulting to OOXML rather than ODF as its native document format. Such an arrangement re-encodes the dependency at the format layer even as it presents independence at every other layer. This is the precise failure mode Section 4.5 describes, and it gives the Foundation’s insistence on a native open format its practical
urgency.

Political reversibility

Sovereignty gains are reversible without durable policy commitment. Munich’s LiMux reversal remains the cautionary precedent, and the year offered a live counter-signal: even as Schleswig-Holstein advanced, Bavaria was reported to be pursuing a major Microsoft 365 contract. This is why a binding federal commitment to ODF, of the kind Germany set in motion in 2025, matters: it raises the cost of reversal. But commitments depend on sustained political will to carry them into enforceable practice.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – make a donation, or get involved and help our volunteers. Thank you!

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Las capas de dependencia no técnicas: el Calendario y la Factura

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:03:24 +0000
En una entrega anterior de esta serie describí la arquitectura invisible del bloqueo como tres capas apiladas. Un documento depende de su formato, que a su vez depende de un motor de renderizado para volverse visible, el cual depende de las fuentes que le dan su forma final. Cada capa

Official TDF Blog: The non technical dependency layers: the Calendar and the Invoice

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:51:48 +0000

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 you must spend money on new hardware – is governed by a vendor’s strategic calendar, not by your operational needs. You reorganised a year of planning around October 2026 because Microsoft told you to, and you will reorganise again around October 2027 for the same reason. A benevolent vendor moving the date without consulting you proves the point exactly as well as a cynical one would. You do not own the clock.

This is the fourth layer. Above format, rendering, and fonts sits time. Your dependency is not only in the file, it is in the calendar.

There is a detail in this story that sharpens the point rather than softening it. The free extension is not unconditional: to enrol without paying, a user must sign in with a Microsoft account and sync settings to the company’s cloud. So the price of keeping your old operating system alive is to move more of yourself into the vendor’s stack. The remedy deepens the dependency it claims to relieve. This is the difference, which I have written about before, between a solution and a substitution. A solution would reduce your dependence. A substitution merely relocates it from the operating system to the account.

The commercial layer

The Italian investigation looks, at first, like a different kind of story altogether: a matter of consumer-protection law, of disclosure and dark patterns, with no obvious connection to open standards. And it would be a mistake to press it into service as evidence of format lock-in, because that is not what it is about. The discipline of letting structure carry the argument requires resisting exactly that kind of stretch.

But it illustrates a different layer cleanly, and the layer is real. When your productivity suite is a proprietary bundle, the vendor can change what you are paying for, and how much, without your meaningful consent. New tools you did not ask for are folded into the package, the price rises to match, and the path to opting out is, allegedly, buried. Whether the AGCM ultimately finds against Microsoft is not the point I am making, as the investigation may take until 2027 to conclude. The point is that the arrangement permits this. The economic terms of your daily work are set by a party that is not you, and can be revised by that party at a moment of its choosing.

This is the fifth layer. Above format, rendering, fonts, and time sits price. Your dependency is in the invoice as much as in the file.

What the layers have in common

Five layers, then: format, rendering, fonts, time, price. The first three are technical and largely invisible. The last two are not technical at all, and they are the ones the user feels most directly, in a migration deadline he did not set, in a subscription cost he did not agree to. Listing them together changes the character of the argument. Lock-in is no longer a catalogue of technical grievances of interest mainly to specialists. It is a complete account of dependency, and it reaches every part of how a person works: what his documents are made of, when his tools will stop being supported, and what he will be charged for them.

What unites all five is a single absence: the user has no exit. He cannot take his documents elsewhere without loss because of the technical layers, he cannot escape the vendor’s calendar or its pricing because of the other two. Every one of these dependencies is only possible because there is no door.

That is why I have spent this series on formats, and on rendering, and on fonts, and now on calendars and invoices. They are not separate complaints. They are the same observation seen from different angles, and the observation is this: an open format and a free application are not, in the first instance, about cost or ideology. They are an exit, they are the door that makes every one of these dependencies optional rather than fixed. The Open Document Format and LibreOffice do not promise that you will never depend on anyone. They promise something narrower and more important: the dependency is one you have chosen, and one you can leave.

A vendor’s calendar will always move. A vendor’s prices will always rise. These are not scandals, they are simply what it means to be governed by someone else’s strategy. The only question that matters is whether you are free to walk away when they do. Everything in this series has been an argument that you should arrange your affairs so that you can.

Images by Manfred Steger from Pixabay

Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice project and community recap: June 2026

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:22:47 +0000

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.)

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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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Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: La arquitectura invisible del bloqueo: la superposición de dependencias

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:00:19 +0000
Existe un mecanismo sofisticado mediante el cual los ecosistemas tecnológicos privativos mantienen su control sobre usuarios e instituciones, incluso cuando estos creen estar tomando decisiones libres, utilizando estándares abiertos y construyendo infraestructura digital independiente. El mecanismo no actúa mediante la fuerza, sino mediante una estrategia más sutil y duradera: la

Official TDF Blog: The invisible architecture of lock-in: the layering of dependencies

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:23:59 +0000

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 European institutions.

But even within this well-mapped terrain, it is worth clarifying the specific mechanism of obscuration at the format layer.

OOXML, the format Microsoft Office produces by default, exists in two conformance levels. Strict is a reasonably clean specification. Transitional is something categorically different: a format designed to encode the accumulated behaviour of earlier Microsoft Office versions, preserving decades of proprietary implementation choices as normative elements of an apparently open standard.

OOXML Transitional includes VML — Vector Markup Language, a proprietary drawing format from the late 1990s that predates and contradicts the DrawingML system defined elsewhere in the same specification.

It includes references defined as “as in earlier versions of Microsoft Office”, which make sense only if one has access to those earlier versions and to their undocumented implementation details.

It includes extensions that allow Microsoft to embed proprietary functionality in documents, invisible to non-Microsoft implementations, and capable of causing silent rendering differences ranging from minor visual variation to complete layout failure.

Crucially, OOXML Transitional is what Microsoft Office produces by default.

Every time a user saves a Word document without selecting a different format, they produce a file optimised for the Microsoft ecosystem and subtly hostile to every other.

Users do not know this is happening, because the choice is made for them at the format level, and when the document fails in LibreOffice, the format layer’s contribution to that failure is invisible. The user sees a rendering problem, not a format problem.

This is the first layer of obscuration: proprietary format constructs masked by the label “industry standard”, producing errors that appear to be implementation shortcomings in the receiving software.

Layer Two: rendering and its unspecified behaviour

The second layer is less discussed, less politically visible, and for these very reasons more durable as a source of interoperability failure: text rendering.

Document format standards specify content. They define what a document contains: text, structure, logical relationships, embedded objects, and formatting instructions.

What they do not specify, and what none of the major document format standards has ever specified, is how that content should be rendered. The translation of encoded content into visible glyphs on a screen or a page is left to the implementation, and different implementations make different choices.

These choices operate across several subsystems.

Shaping engines — the software components that translate sequences of Unicode characters into sequences of glyphs, and that handle the complex rules of scripts such as Arabic, Devanagari and Thai — differ by platform.

HarfBuzz, the open source shaping engine used by LibreOffice and by most Linux applications, produces correct, standards-compliant output, but that output may differ in detail from Windows’ Uniscribe or DirectWrite engines, particularly for complex scripts with context-sensitive glyph selection.

The differences are almost always invisible for Latin text, but for the non-Latin scripts used by a significant portion of the European public sector and citizenry, they can be significant.

Hinting interpretation varies across rendering engines. Fonts embed hinting instructions — algorithms that adjust glyph outlines for crisp display at low screen resolutions — but those instructions are interpreted differently by different renderers.

A font optimised for Windows’ GDI rendering engine may display with different weight and spacing under FreeType on Linux, even at identical sizes.

The differences are minute for any single character, but they affect the perceived quality of the text and contribute to the general impression that open source environments are slightly less polished.

Line-breaking and justification algorithms are the most significant source of rendering variation and the most direct cause of document reflow.

The algorithm that determines where to break lines — how to distribute words across a line of a given width, whether and how to hyphenate, how to handle justified text — is an implementation choice that no format specification regulates.

Microsoft Word’s line-breaking algorithm is proprietary and undocumented, and it is very different from LibreOffice’s. Both are legitimate implementations of the same function, and they can produce different line breaks; different line breaks mean different page breaks; and different page breaks mean that a document paginated in Word will not be paginated the same way in LibreOffice.

This is not a defect in implementation quality, but the normal and predictable consequence of differing rendering choices that document format standards do not define. And it produces errors that are invariably attributed to the software receiving the document, because that is where the visible difference appears, rather than to the specifications that are their cause.

The rendering layer is the most technically complex component of the layered dependency and the hardest to address, but it is also the layer that most clearly reveals the dimensions of the problem: an error generated by a different choice made by two projects, attributed solely to the open source software, on the basis of an entirely unjustified, almost faith-based trust in the quality of the proprietary software.

Layer Three: fonts and the dependency on proprietary resources

The third layer completes the picture and, in many practical settings, causes the greatest damage: fonts. Here we will not analyse font-level lock-in as such, but will instead explain how the font layer operates within the layered dependency model.

Fonts interact with both layers above. At the format level, fonts appear as named references: a document declares that the body text is set in Calibri and the headings in Cambria. If those two fonts are not available on the receiving system — and this is the case on every system for which a licence for the proprietary fonts has not been acquired — the software must substitute them.

Substitution changes the metrics, and the metrics in turn change the geometry. Altered geometry produces reflow, broken layouts, forms overflowing their margins; and here too the failure is attributed to the application receiving the document.

At the rendering level, fonts interact with the shaping engine, the hinting system and the antialiasing pipeline in ways specific to each font’s design and embedded instructions. A font optimised for the Windows rendering stack will display differently under FreeType, even before any substitution occurs, and this contributes to the overall visual divergence between environments.

What makes the font layer particularly effective as a lock-in mechanism is the combination of legal unavailability and the user’s lack of information. The proprietary fonts at the heart of the problem — Calibri and Cambria, and before them Arial and Times — are not available under any kind of open source licence.

This is a legal constraint that open source software cannot overcome, but one that users perceive not as a licensing problem but as a software problem — not as the consequence of a strategy but as proof that open source software cannot handle ordinary documents.

Only Aptos, the latest of Microsoft’s proprietary fonts, is released under a partially restrictive licence, since it ties use to a download from Microsoft’s site. It can therefore be installed by Linux users too, and used legally, but this has not been communicated widely enough, so the lock-in mechanism is only reduced, not eliminated.

Why “invisible” is the key word

Each of the three layers would be a manageable problem if it were visible, and if users had the chance to see clearly that the error originates in the proprietary format, or in the insufficient rendering specifications, or in the proprietary font. Visible problems can be addressed and solved on the basis of accurate diagnosis and targeted intervention.

The strength of this scheme lies in its obscurity. Each layer acts as a signal re-encoder: it takes the output of the layer beneath it and re-emits it as something that looks like a different kind of problem.

So the dependency on proprietary fonts produces an error that looks like a software rendering issue; the rendering problem produces an error that looks like an implementation shortcoming; and finally the proprietary format structure produces an error that looks like a failure to comply with standards.

By the time the error reaches the user, its origin is completely obscured, and responsibility is systematically redirected to the last element in the chain: the open source software, which was merely trying to display a document designed to defeat it.

This is not a coincidence arising from poor design.

Software that generated random errors would be a problem for the company that developed it, because user frustration would flow back toward the originating software.
A system that generates errors at the boundary with competitors, in such a way that they are always attributed to those competitors, is a competitive asset.

Here the question of intent matters less than the question of structure: whatever the motivation behind the original design decisions, the resulting architecture functions as a constraint, and its effects are observable and measurable.

How policy responded, and where it failed

The policy response to document lock-in has concentrated on the format: mandating the use of ODF and open formats in public procurement, and guaranteeing that government documents can be created and consulted without the use of proprietary software. Unfortunately, these interventions have almost never been paired with penalties to enforce compliance, and the rules have often been ignored.

Moreover, these format mandates have not addressed the use of proprietary fonts in document templates, so by fixing only the upper layer they leave the lower one exposed and fully operational, where it is less visible and less politically salient, and therefore more durable.

Documents continue to fail at the boundary with open source software, and users continue to blame the latter. The political will behind the format mandate is progressively eroded by user complaints about interoperability problems, which seem to contradict the promise of the open, standard format mandate itself.

An institution that deploys LibreOffice but fails to address rendering consistency — allowing a mixed infrastructure of Windows and Linux systems to exchange documents without recognising that rendering variation is not a software defect — risks creating an internal interoperability problem that could be used to justify a return to monoculture.

The rendering layer has received almost no policy attention. No major digital sovereignty framework specifies rendering-fidelity requirements. No procurement standard defines conformance in terms of visual consistency across implementations.

The tools to address this problem — reference rendering implementations, rendering test suites, fidelity benchmarks — exist only as prototypes or proposals, and have not been integrated into any serious policy framework.

Knowing this pattern is a political act

The invisible layering of dependencies is a pattern born of nearly fifty years of unregulated evolution of personal productivity software, and one that threatens to make the path toward digital sovereignty extraordinarily complex.

It matters to give the pattern a name, so that it can be used in policy discussions, in parliamentary questions, in procurement specifications and in the public debate on digital sovereignty, at every level, including by the media.

The invisible layering of dependencies connects phenomena that do not appear to be related — document format incompatibilities, rendering variation, font substitution failures — and shows that they are expressions of the same underlying architecture.

Once these phenomena are seen as a pattern rather than as isolated technical problems, an appropriate policy response becomes clearer, because it is not enough to fix a single layer and mandate a single standard — even though that is a fundamental first step.

It is necessary to make all the dependencies legible and to integrate them into interoperability policies that address format, rendering and fonts explicitly and specifically, with enforcement mechanisms applying to all three layers.

The open source and open standards community has built the technical foundations for genuine interoperability: open formats are mature and solid, open source applications are fully up to the task, and there are hundreds of openly licensed fonts, many of them metric-compatible with the proprietary ones.

The architecture of lock-in does not persist because the alternatives are inadequate. It persists because policy has not yet learned to look beyond the visible surface of format conformance and to recognise the underlying layers where proprietary dependencies go on operating — invisible and ignored — doing the work they were designed to do.

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Actividades de mercadotecnia de LibreOffice – Informe Anual TDF de 2025

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:29:00 +0000
Esto forma parte del Informe Anual 2025 de The Document Foundation, la organización sin fines de lucro que coordina el proyecto y la comunidad de LibreOffice. En 2025, The Document Foundation y la comunidad global de LibreOffice llevaron a cabo un programa de mercadotecnia y promoción que combinó el trabajo

Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice Marketing Activities in 2025 – TDF Annual Report

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:31:45 +0000

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 the now-established pattern of agenda, speaker, and live-update coverage. Two major regional conferences extended the programme across the world’s communities: the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2025, hosted in Japan, and the VI Latin American LibreOffice Congress, held in Havana. Both brought together contributors and users from their respective regions, generated substantial follow-up content, and reinforced the project’s presence in two of its most active geographies.

The community calendar was also rich with smaller regional events that the marketing team supported and amplified, including the LibreItalia Conference 2025, LinuxDays 2025 in Prague, the OSS Conf 2025 in Luxembourg, an event in Nepal tied to Software Freedom Day, the Augsburger Linux-Infoday, the Prague Installfest, the Univention Summit, the Linux Arena in Pordenone (Italy), and FLISoL Brasília. The project also maintained a presence at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels at the start of the year.

Community Building and Recognition

The recurring Month of LibreOffice campaigns ran again in May and November, recognising and rewarding contributors across development, documentation, QA, localisation, and marketing through digital badges, public acknowledgement, and sticker packs and merchandise shipped to participants. The campaign continued to serve both as a celebration of existing contributors and as an on-ramp for new ones.

A significant structural development was the launch of the LibreOffice US community in November. Recognising that the United States, despite a large user base, had never developed an organised local community, TDF created dedicated communication channels (Discord, bridged to Matrix, and a Mastodon account) with the goal of supporting US-specific merchandise, marketing and advocacy materials, and meetups.

Documentation, Publications and Merchandise

The community continued to expand its published resources as a marketing and onboarding asset. New user guides were released for the 25.2 line, alongside the Calc Guide 24.8 and Czech translations of the Getting Started Guide 24.8 and the Calc Guide 25.2, reflecting the contribution of native-language communities. New LibreOffice Expert magazines for 2025–2026 were made available for schools and local communities, and a new line of LibreOffice merchandise was introduced to support events, giveaways, and fundraising.

Media, Press Relations and Social Media

TDF sustained its media relations work throughout the year, issuing press releases tied to releases, milestones, events, and public-sector adoption, and reinforcing LibreOffice’s position as a cost-effective, secure, and privacy-respecting alternative to proprietary office suites. The social media strategy continued across Mastodon, LinkedIn, and the project’s other channels, with particular emphasis on reaching decision-makers in public administration through case studies and adoption stories, and on carrying the digital-sovereignty argument to professional and policy audiences. Monthly project-and-community recaps provided a steady, aggregated record of activity across the year.

Public-Sector Adoption

Public-sector migration continued to be one of the most persuasive elements of the project’s external messaging, demonstrating LibreOffice’s viability at institutional scale and lending concrete weight to the digital-sovereignty argument that ran through the year’s advocacy. These migrations were amplified through press and social channels as evidence that open standards and open-source office software are a realistic foundation for public administration.

Conclusion

In 2025, TDF’s marketing and advocacy work matured from software promotion into a coherent public case for digital sovereignty built on open document standards. Anchored by the fifteenth anniversary and the 400-million-download milestone, sharpened by the end of Windows 10 and the defence of ODF, and sustained by conferences, community campaigns, publications, and steady media work, the year’s activities both amplified LibreOffice’s visibility and strengthened the wider argument that documents — and the institutions that depend on them — are better served by open standards and community-driven software.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – make a donation, or get involved and help our volunteers. Thank you!

Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice Downloads and Donations in 2025 – TDF Annual Report

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:13:26 +0000

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 a one-off event.

The update page offers a complementary perspective. It recorded 581,615,673 visits during the year — a figure that, while not deduplicated, gives a sense of the scale of the active user community. On a conservative basis, the Foundation estimates the LibreOffice user base at around 100 million, with a substantial further number of occasional users. A higher reading is also defensible: at a ratio of roughly one user for every three to four update-page visits, the active community would fall between 140 and 180 million.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – make a donation, or get involved and help our volunteers. Thank you!

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Conferencia LibreOffice y Eventos Externos– Informe Anual TDF de 2025

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:01:50 +0000
Esto forma parte del Informe Anual 2025 de The Document Foundation, la organización sin fines de lucro que coordina el proyecto y la comunidad de LibreOffice. Pronto se publicará más información… Conferencia de LibreOffice La Conferencia de LibreOffice fue el encuentro anual de la comunidad mundial de LibreOffice, que reunió

Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice Conference and External Events – TDF Annual Report 2025

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:52:02 +0000

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.

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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 Linux-Infotag 2025 event took place in southern Germany, and LibreOffice was present with a stand and merchandise. Another German event was the Univention Summit 2025: it took place on January 23 and 24 in Bremen, and the LibreOffice project was present and met with the people overseeing the migration to LibreOffice in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Italian community members attended the Linux Arena event from April 25 – 27 in Pordenone. They had a LibreOffice stand with a 32″ monitor, showing an Impress presentation about LibreOffice on a loop. At the stand they met different interested people – some of whom they already know since they visit the fair regularly, while others they saw for the first time. There was curiosity about LibreOffice, and this time the stand personal noticed an increasing demand about AI integration and related plugins. The LibreOffice coffee/beer mats were very much appreciated by visitors to the stand.

Later in the year, Community members in Nepal tuned in to an online call and turned Software Freedom Day 2025 into a success. Birendra Open Source Club – one of the student clubs and LibreOffice project contributors in Nepal, with support from Liaison Suraj Bhattarai and other key open source clubs, hopped onto Discord on 20 September.

On October 4 and 5, the LinuxDays 2025 event took place at the Faculty of Information Technology (Czech Technical University) in Prague. It combined stands for free and open source software projects with workshops and talks, and the Czech-speaking LibreOffice community was there.

Members of the Indian LibreOffice community celebrated Document Freedom Day in Noida on 29 March. The event featured a few talks on free software such as OpenStreetMap, Prav and KDE, and also a lawyer told attendees how they manage all their clients’ data with free software and keeping their privacy in mind. LibreOffice merchandise was distributed at the sticker table.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – make a donation, or get involved and help our volunteers. Thank you!

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: The Document Foundation: el nombre que apuntaba a lo correcto, hace 16 años

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:16:19 +0000
Cuando se anunció The Document Foundation hace dieciséis años, a algunas personas les pareció que el nombre era un poco soso. No brillaba. Se refería a un objeto -el documento- en lugar de a un producto, un movimiento o una aspiración. Hoy en día, vale la pena volver a analizar

Official TDF Blog: The Document Foundation: the name that pointed at the right thing, 16 years before

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:00:19 +0000

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.

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Lanzamientos de LibreOffice, funciones, control de calidad y accesibilidad – Informe Anual 2025 de TDF

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:41:36 +0000
Esto forma parte del Informe Anual 2025 de The Document Foundation (TDF), la organización sin fines de lucro que coordina el proyecto y la comunidad de LibreOffice. Próximamente se publicarán más contenidos. Lanzamientos del año El plan de lanzamientos de LibreOffice sigue un calendario basado en el tiempo, con actualizaciones

LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: May 2026

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:04:06 +0000
General Activities LibreOffice 25.8.7 was announced on May 12 Olivier Hallot (TDF) improved the explanation for DATE function in Calc’s Function Wizard, continued documenting in help how LibreOffice treats non-integer values for function parameters expecting integer values, added a help page for Draft View in Writer, added help for Calculated

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Euro-Office, los estándares abiertos y el formato ODF nativo

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:43:58 +0000
Un compromiso muy positivo con los estándares abiertos, y por qué debería culminar con el ODF como formato de documento nativo de Euro-Office. El preanuncio de Euro-Office ha generado una considerable cobertura en la prensa europea durante los últimos días. The Document Foundation celebra la atención que están recibiendo los

Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Carta abierta a los usuarios de paquetes ofimáticos, justo antes del anuncio de Euro-Office

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:58:12 +0000
Estimados usuarios de paquetes ofimáticos: En los últimos días habrán leído diversos artículos que anuncian la llegada de Euro-Office, que se está promocionando como el primer paquete ofimático de código abierto desarrollado en Europa. Nos vemos obligados -a regañadientes, ya que el código abierto debe basarse en la transparencia, no

Marius Popa Adrian: Firebird Adds Unix Domain Socket Support

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:20:15 +0000
Firebird is gaining support for Unix Domain Sockets (UDS) through PR #9034, a feature aimed at improving local inter-process connectivity, especially in constrained environments like Android and iOS. The change introduces a new unix:// connection string format and a RemoteServiceUnixSocket configuration option, allowing Firebird clients and services to communicate over filesystem-based sockets

LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: April 2026

Wed, 13 May 2026 10:19:27 +0000
General Activities LibreOffice 26.2.3 was announced on April 30 Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated Writer’s Compatibility options help, improved documentation for wrapped images in headers, worked on documenting in help how LibreOffice treats non-integer values for function parameters expecting integer values, improved help for Declare statement in BASIC, added help for

Marius Popa Adrian: How Firebird’s New Parallel Sort Changes Everything

Fri, 08 May 2026 14:38:29 +0000
Breaking the Single-Thread Barrier: How Firebird’s New Parallel Sort Changes Everything1. Introduction: The Multi-Core ParadoxThere is a specific economic and technical frustration well-known to database architects: authorizing the purchase of high-end silicon with 64 or 128 cores, only to watch the OS scheduler show a single thread redlining while the rest of the hardware sits idle.

Marius Popa Adrian: Help Us Test the New Firebird Docker Images

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:43:24 +0000
Major Update: Help Us Test the New Firebird Docker Images We have been working on a significant overhaul of the official firebird-docker images, and a pre-release version is now available for testing at: Pre-release Container Registry We would love to get feedback from the community before these changes are merged upstream. What’s New Firebird 6