On 13 October 2026, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021. No more security updates, no more fixes, no more assurances. The software will still launch. It will still open your files. But from that date it becomes a liability rather than an asset — and the only sanctioned path forward runs through a subscription.
This is not a bug in the model. It is the model.
Support that does not expire
LibreOffice has no end-of-support date, because there is no vendor with the power to declare one. The code is public. The development is community-driven and foundation-governed. When a release cycle closes, the next one is already available, free, to everyone — not to those who renewed.
The distinction matters more than it appears. Microsoft’s lifecycle policy is a commercial instrument: the date is chosen, not discovered. It marks the moment when continuing to use software you paid for becomes unwise, and it exists to convert perpetual licences into recurring revenue. LibreOffice cannot issue such a date because no one holds the authority to issue it.
Ownership of documents, not just access to them
A support deadline is the visible layer. Underneath it sits something more consequential: the format your documents are written in.
LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO standard maintained by OASIS and implemented by multiple independent applications. The specification is public, complete, and readable. Anyone can write software that opens an ODF file correctly — today, or in forty years, using tools that have not yet been written.
OOXML, despite carrying an ISO number, is not comparable in practice. The standard that was approved and the format that Microsoft Office actually writes have diverged. Independent implementations remain approximations. This is why round-tripping a complex document between suites degrades it, and why the degradation is always the fault of the software that did not write the format in the first place.
The consequence is simple. If your archive is in OOXML, your ability to read it depends on a commercial relationship with a single company continuing indefinitely. If your archive is in ODF, it does not.
Documents are software
A modern document is not a page. It is a structured artefact: markup, style definitions, embedded objects, references to fonts, scripts, conditional logic, external data. It is executed by an application in exactly the way a program is executed by a runtime.
We accepted decades ago that critical software should not be built on formats and interfaces controlled by a single vendor. Documents have escaped that scrutiny only because they look like paper. They are not paper. The same argument that makes open standards essential for software makes them essential for the files that record contracts, medical histories, legislation, research, and institutional memory.
Costs that stop compounding
The licence saving is real but it is the least interesting part of the calculation. What changes structurally is the removal of a recurring, unilaterally repriceable line item from the budget — one that has risen repeatedly and will rise again, because the customer has no alternative to negotiate with.
Migration has costs. Training, template conversion, macro rewrites, integration work. These are one-off and quantifiable. Subscription is perpetual and is not.
Independence from the deployment model
Support deadlines are increasingly used to move users from local installation to cloud service. That transition is not neutral. It changes where documents reside, which jurisdiction governs them, who can be compelled to disclose them, and whether work is possible when connectivity is not.
LibreOffice runs locally, on Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, and in a browser via LibreOffice Technology-based online solutions — as a choice, not as a condition of receiving updates.
What October 2026 actually asks
The deadline poses a question that the deadline itself cannot answer: should the readability of your organisation’s documents in 2046 depend on decisions made by a company in 2026?
If the answer is no, the migration is not a reaction to an end-of-support notice. It is the correction of a dependency that should never have been accepted.
Support ends on a date someone else chooses. Ownership does not end at all.
LibreOffice is developed by The Document Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Berlin, and is available free of charge at libreoffice.org. The Document Foundation publishes a LibreOffice Migration Protocol for organisations planning a structured transition.