On 28 September 2010, a group of OpenOffice.org community members announced the launch of the LibreOffice project and the foundation that would support it: The Document Foundation. The announcement sparked some confusion and scepticism, as well as enormous enthusiasm amongst those in the community who believe in free and open-source software.
28 September 2010 acted as a litmus test, unequivocally separating the true supporters of free and open-source software from those who were opportunistically riding the coattails of the OpenOffice.org project, or waiting for the right moment to stamp their own proprietary mark on it.
Sixteen years on, LibreOffice has been independent for longer than OpenOffice.org ever was under Sun Microsystems. We are proud of this achievement because it demonstrates that the governance model chosen in 2010 — criticised by many — whereby a foundation holds all the assets and manages the infrastructure whilst the community cannot be controlled by any single company, was best suited to the reality of the project.
Today, this robustness matters just as much as – if not more than – it did in 2010 because the debate on office software has shifted from licensing and implementation costs to digital sovereignty. It is a concept that we have championed for over 20 years, ever since OpenOffice.org began using the standard open ODF (Open Document Format) file format.
At the time, the term ‘digital sovereignty’ was not yet in use, but the issue was already clear: control over the format in which public documents are stored, and how this format evolves, must not lie with a single company, but with the community.
In this sense, ODF is the “sovereign” format par excellence because it does not depend on the authority — and therefore the commercial strategies — of a single company, but on the users — individuals, organisations, and businesses — who use it and determine its evolution through the contributions of experts within the independent OASIS Technical Committee, which comprises companies, foundations, public bodies, and individuals.
As the only “sovereign” format, ODF acts as a litmus test for office suites that claim to champion digital sovereignty yet continue to use the proprietary OOXML format, thereby submitting to Microsoft’s monopoly. They are in good company, given that even the scientific community has renamed our genome for the same reason.
LibreOffice is the only office suite to use ODF as its native format without proclaiming itself a champion of digital sovereignty because, after sixteen years of consistent behaviour, it does not need to chase trends to secure its place in the market. The figures prove it: today, downloads stand at a steady one million per week, and the updates website receives almost fifty million visits per month.
We would simply like all software that proclaims itself a champion of digital sovereignty to demonstrate the same level of consistency as the LibreOffice project. This means not bowing to the Microsoft monopoly in pursuit of a theoretical goal — namely, compatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary format — which ultimately leads them to betray the very digital sovereignty they claim to champion.
Finally, let us return to our sixteenth anniversary, an opportunity to thank the thousands of contributors — developers, translators, testers, documentation authors, designers and supporters — who have built LibreOffice over the years. Most of these contributors remain unseen by the users who benefit from their work.
Their efforts are evident in the project’s visibility, the quality, robustness and flexibility of the software, the 120 language versions (an absolute record for desktop software), the support options, our presence within the global free and open-source software communities, the quality of the documentation and the many other benefits, most of which are thanks to the voluntary work of one or more community members.
Thank you all. Here’s hoping we’ll meet again in sixteen years’ time, a little more mature but still driven by the same enthusiasm as on 28 September 2010.