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Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF

A welcome commitment to open standards — and why it should end with ODF as Euro-Office’s native document format. The Euro-Office pre-announcement has generated considerable coverage across the European press over the past few days. The Document Foundation welcomes the attention that open standards are receiving — and welcomes still more the commitment the announcement makes to them. Before the discussion settles, we would like to clarify one point and state one expectation. Several reports have described Euro-Office as “the first European open source office suite.” Reading the pre-announcement carefully, we do not find the coalition making that claim, and it is not one we would endorse. Europe has been building free and open source office software for many years: LibreOffice, developed by this Foundation and a worldwide community, is itself European, mature, and far from alone. The “first” framing appears to have emerged in the speed of a launch day rather than in the text of the announcement. We note it not to claim precedence — precedence is not the point — but because accuracy serves the cause of open standards better than enthusiasm alone. Read on its merits, the announcement gives a great deal to welcome. The promise

ODF vs OOXML, an issue that should never have existed

A number of journalists read last week’s piece as an attack on Microsoft. We want to explain what they walked past. Whenever we address the contrast between ODF and OOXML, some people perceive it as a campaign against a company. It is not. We are trying to do something far more useful: to make the structural problem with the standard document format clear to those who have to live with it: public officials, educators, and above all, individual citizens. All these people find themselves facing a problem they did not create, but which affects them daily, and of which they are often the unwitting victims, every time they create a document or receive one. The least we can do – and in fact we have been doing it for twenty years, though until now almost no one has listened – is to explain, clearly and without drama, how the problem arose, why it persists, and why ODF is the only way out. It is an educational and selfless goal – we do not sell software, so we have no commercial interest to protect – and not an attack on a company. The problem concerns the current document landscape, based almost

There is no digital sovereignty without ODF

Any other choice is a choice of dependence on a single vendor Digital sovereignty begins with the document format. Everything else – server location, hosting jurisdiction, procurement clauses – is downstream of this single decision. If the format is standard and open, the user controls the document. If the format is proprietary the vendor controls it, even when the file sits on the user’s own hard drive. This is why LibreOffice, and its derivatives such as Collabora Office and Online, are today the only legitimate choice for governments, supranational bodies, businesses and organisations that want to protect the digital freedom of their users. Only software based on the LibreOffice source code – the LibreOffice Technology – uses ODF as its native document format. Every document saved, stored, retained and exchanged in ODF remains the exclusive property of its author, and remains so over the years. ODF – Open Document Format, as the name says – was designed and developed in accordance with the characteristics of a true open standard: clearly documented, transparently developed by an independent body, properly versioned, built on existing standards, and stored in XML files that any user can read. None of this applies to OOXML. The

Twenty Years On, ODF Is Still the Only Open Standard for Office Documents, and the Only One Governments Can Trust

Berlin, 8 May 2026 – Twenty years ago this week, on 3 May 2006, the Open Document Format cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 with unanimous approval. On 30 November 2006 it was published as ISO/IEC 26300. Two decades later, ODF remains what it was on the day of its ratification: the only open, vendor-neutral, freely implementable international standard for office documents in existence. Everything else on the market is a vendor format with a standards number attached. That distinction was contested in 2006. It is not contestable in 2026. The competing format pushed through ISO in 2008 – under a fast-track process whose abuses are now part of the documentary record of standards governance – has since splintered into a Strict variant almost no implementation actually uses and a Transitional variant that preserves, by design, the undocumented behaviours of a single vendor’s legacy products. A standard that exists to encode one company’s bugs is not a standard. It is a moat with a certificate. ODF has no Transitional mode. It has no undocumented behaviours. It has no vendor whose commercial roadmap can quietly rewrite what conformance means. The specification is publicly available at no

Thank you, on behalf of ODF

Recently, The Document Foundation published an open letter to European citizens. We asked Euro-Office – the new coalition forming around a European alternative for productivity – whether ODF (the Open Document Format) would be its native document format. Unfortunately, we have not yet received a reply, and this confirms – at least in part – the suspicion that Euro-Office will join Microsoft’s allies in a strategy to lock in European citizens, who will see their content snatched away by a company that – in words only – presents itself as a defender of digital sovereignty. With the open letter, we have raised an issue that the general debate is not yet grasping: digital sovereignty is not determined solely by the terms of the licence and the location of the server, but by the format in which documents are created, stored and exchanged. We were able to pose our question publicly, with confidence, because we represent something extremely solid – support for the single open and standard format: ODF – which has been built up over twenty years by many people, whose names rarely appear in press releases. The foundations underpinning the political moment Germany has established by law that ODF

ODF is the future, OOXML is the past

Whenever a user, a government, a school or a business chooses the format in which to store and exchange its digital documents, it is not merely making a technical decision, but is placing a bet on the kind of digital infrastructure on which it will depend in the future. In this sense, ODF and OOXML are not two equivalent options on the same shelf, but two radically different solutions: one geared towards a future of openness, interoperability and digital sovereignty, and the other towards a past of defending a vendor’s dominant market position through user lock-in. ODF: designed to be open and transparent Open Document Format was conceived from the outset to be an open standard. It was designed and developed by the community under the auspices of OASIS, and subsequently ratified by ISO, to be implemented by anyone, on any platform, without royalties, without hidden dependencies and without the permission of any single company. These are not trivial technical details, but a statement of political and economic strategy embedded within the format itself. ODF is based on a clean XML schema, easy to read even by non-technical users and reusable. Colour naming follows standard web conventions, and its architecture

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.4

Berlin, 5 June 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.4, the fourth maintenance update to…

Open Document Format

How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and…