MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026 is being organised by Debian India. The event will be hosted at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur on 14 – 15 March 2026 – and the LibreOffice community will be there! We’ll have a stall, and The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the suite, is proud to be a sponsor too.
LibreOffice is only possible thanks to your donations! Here’s how they helped us in 2025 – and if you want to support our project and community, please see this page. Thank you 😊
As part of the Outreachy programme, which aims to bring a wider variety of people into the tech industry, Siddhi Salunkhe has been working on improvements to the LibreOffice hyperlink dialog box. It now has standard tabs, and will be easier to maintain going forward. Thanks to Ilmari and Heiko at TDF for providing mentoring during this project! The improvements will be in LibreOffice 26.8, later this year.
LibreOffice is a desktop application, but we get many requests for a web-based version of the suite that users can deploy on their own infrastructure. Several years ago, project members started to develop LibreOffice Online, but in 2022 the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation voted to freeze the project and put it in the “attic”, for reasons that have now been superseded.
Earlier this month, the current Board of Directors decided to revoke those votes to give new life to the project, as Eliane Domingos, chairperson, put it:
To start the process of freeing LibreOffice Online, and to start the journey that will lead to having an online version by the community and for the community.
Now the work begins. We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF’s team agrees that it’s safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward. We will actively work with the community to identify how to foster LibreOffice Online, including its technological basis, QA and marketing.
Note that this doesn’t mean that TDF will host or provide enterprise support for LibreOffice Online – that’s beyond the scope of the foundation. For these things, users are strongly recommended to consult the commercial ecosystem around LibreOffice. But TDF wants to offer the technology for those who want to use, modify and share it.
We will post more soon about our plans, and ways to get involved. We look forward to a new future for LibreOffice Online!
The LibreOffice community was at FOSDEM 2026, to talk to users, answer questions, and encourage people to join the project. And we had merch:
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LibreOffice is free software – but “free” is about way more than just being zero-cost. It’s about giving users fundamental freedoms in how they run, share, study and improve their software and computers – giving control back to them.
For example, the source code for LibreOffice – that is, the human-readable “recipe” behind the program – is available for everyone to see, study and modify. You can download this code, see what it does, change it for your needs, and then turn it back into an executable version for your computer. Many hundreds of people have done this already, contributing back important changes and updates to LibreOffice. And then you’re free to share the changes with other users.
This is in contrast to most other office suites, which don’t give users these freedoms; they are “closed”, so users can’t look under the hood, can’t study how they work, can’t make changes, and can’t share the software. Users become restricted and trapped, controlled by and locked into specific software from a specific company – the very opposite of freedom.
So today, on “I love Free Software Day“, we at The Document Foundation would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who works on free software such as LibreOffice. Whether you’re involved in development, QA, design, translations, marketing, infrastructure or any other projects – we ❤️ your support.
