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.
BERLIN, Germany — The ODF Toolkit community is proud to announce the official release of version 0.13.0. This release marks a significant transition point in the project’s history, representing the last release to support JDK 11, with the project pivoting toward modern Java long-term support (LTS) releases.
The 0.13.0 release provides a stable, high-performance foundation for programmatic manipulation of ODF 1.2 documents.
Following the release, the project’s core developers met in person at FOSDEM in Brussels, using the opportunity to align on the project’s next major milestone. During the event, the team finalised the roadmap for the upcoming 1.0.0 Release Candidate. Discussions focused on resolving the remaining blocking issues in the toolkit’s code-generation engine, paving the way for a more robust and extensible architecture.
The project has already moved its development baseline to JDK 17 for the upcoming version, 0.14.0.
The project continues to grow its community of maintainers. Following discussions between Michael Stahl, Oliver Rau, and Svante Schubert, Axel Howitz has been granted commit rights, strengthening the project’s long-term sustainability and development capacity. Axel’s contributions since joining last year have been instrumental in maintaining the project’s momentum toward its 1.0.0 goals.
The ODF Toolkit 0.13.0 is available via the official project page.
The ODF Toolkit is a community-driven, open-source Java library for creating, scanning, and manipulating OpenDocument Format (ODF) files. By providing a lightweight API that operates independently of any office suite, it remains a preferred choice for server-side document automation.
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…
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Here’s a selection of new features in LibreOffice 26.2, which we released on Wednesday. (This video is also available on PeerTube.)
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Hello! We are at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels – come and say hello, let us know what you think about LibreOffice, and get cool merch…
