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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 cost from ISO and from OASIS. The schemas are auditable. The implementations are multiple, independent, and free. This is not advocacy language. It is the working definition of a standard, and ODF is the only office-document format that meets it.

The political weather has finally caught up with the technical reality. Germany’s federal administration has mandated ODF through the Deutschland-Stack. The European Commission’s own services are under sustained pressure – including from this Foundation – to align procurement with the open-standards commitments the Commission itself has signed. Brazil has legislated open formats into its educational system through Lei 15.211/2025. The pattern is the same on every continent where public bodies have stopped to ask the only question that matters: in what format does a society keep its own records, and who decides when that format changes?

For twenty years, the answer to the second question – for any administration that chose ODF – has been: we do. For any administration that chose the alternative, the answer has been: the vendor does, and the administration will be informed.

“ODF is the document format of a public that has decided not to outsource its memory,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “The governments now mandating ODF are not making a technical choice. They are reclaiming a sovereignty they should never have surrendered.”

The implementation landscape reflects the same divide. LibreOffice, developed by The Document Foundation and a global community of contributors, uses ODF as its native format and is the reference implementation of the standard. Collabora Online extends ODF support to enterprise and cloud deployments. Together they constitute the working core of the ODF ecosystem. Other office suites – including those that market themselves with the vocabulary of openness while defaulting to a competitor’s vendor format – are not part of that ecosystem and should not be confused with it.

The Document Foundation will mark the twentieth anniversary across 2026 with a programme of publications, policy briefs, and community events. The LibreOffice Conference will dedicate a full track to ODF, coordinated with the OASIS Technical Committee, which is currently advancing version 1.4 of the specification. Material on the history, the structural design, and the policy implications of ODF will be published throughout the year on the TDF blog.

A standard is worth what it still does after the people who wrote it have moved on. ODF is read, written, and trusted by software none of its original authors imagined, on hardware none of them could have specified, in jurisdictions none of them lobbied. It has aged the way public infrastructure is supposed to age: quietly, reliably, and in everyone’s hands.

That is the anniversary worth marking. Not the certificate from 2006, but the twenty years of evidence since: evidence that the open-standards bet was the right one, that the alternative was the trap its critics warned it would be, and that the governments now choosing ODF are not innovating. They are catching up.

LibreOffice at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2026

LibreOffice stand at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2026

Most of the work in the LibreOffice project takes place online – in our Git repository, on mailing lists, on IRC and other places. But where possible, we like to meet in-person as well, at events around the world! Last weekend, for instance, we were at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag in southern Germany.

As the name suggests, this event is all about Linux and free and open source software (FOSS). The LibreOffice community was present with a stand, and we had a laptop to demonstrate the software, along with merchandise: flyers giving reasons to use LibreOffice; flyers explaining what The Document Foundation does; stickers; and beer/coffee mats.

LibreOffice stand at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2026

Most of the visitors to our stand were already familiar with LibreOffice – as is expected at such an event. But visitors also had lots of questions, like:

  • Where is LibreOffice being widely used now?
  • How can I customise the user interface?
  • Where can I report a bug?

We also talked to several people helping to roll out LibreOffice in companies and local administrations, so we hope to have more news about those migrations soon. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and our next planned event in Germany is FrOSCon, so see you there!

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 is the mandatory format for public administration, whilst the Interoperable Europe Act has made open standards a legal obligation across all EU Member States. Consequently, policymakers in Berlin and Brussels are now championing arguments that once circulated only on technical mailing lists and in standardisation committee rooms.

None of this came out of nowhere.

Before there were mandates, there were organisations funding the development of ODF when no politician and no law required it. Here, The Document Foundation has always been at the forefront, alongside various companies in its ecosystem.

Before there were legislative victories, there were the members of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, who maintained, defended and evolved the specification against all odds: hostile standardisation battles, years of institutional indifference, and a market that had decided – in deference to monopolistic positions – that the matter had already been settled in favour of the proprietary OOXML format.

Before there were announcements of coalitions and summits on sovereignty, there were users who chose ODF and continued to choose it, year after year, accepting the challenge of the incompatibility scientifically imposed by OOXML as a price worth paying to retain control and ownership of their own content.

This is the foundation upon which every recent political achievement rests.

The legislation cites a standard that exists and is maintained. The arguments on interoperability point to a format that works, is implementable and has a community behind it. The questions we are now able to ask publicly – of institutions, coalitions and the ecosystem – are possible because the answer to the question “does open document interoperability work?” has been provided by all those people who did not wait for institutions to wake up after years of hibernation to prove it.

The funders of the ODF format

Developing and maintaining an international standard is not a free labour of love. It requires legal infrastructure, technical expertise, constant organisational commitment and the patience to operate on timescales that no quarterly reporting cycle would recognise as rational.

The organisations that funded the development of ODF – The Document Foundation and its predecessors and partners – have made a long-term commitment to the principle that the infrastructure of written communication must not be the proprietary asset of a single supplier. A commitment that is now being confirmed at a legislative level, the credit for which goes – largely – to all those who made it before it was available.

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee

Standards do not maintain themselves. Behind every version of the ODF specification – from the initial 1.0 to the current 1.4 – there are people who have dedicated their time and professional expertise to a slow process largely invisible to all those who ultimately benefit from its results.

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee worked both during the controversies over ISO standardisation – the period when the approval of OOXML threatened to render the entire ODF effort politically irrelevant – and during the long years when market share data offered little encouragement.

Despite this, it produced a technically coherent specification that is genuinely implementable and designed – unlike its rival – with interoperability as a fundamental principle rather than an afterthought.

Today, when a politician identifies ODF as the standard to be adopted by their administration, they are honouring the results of that work, which deserves to be mentioned and recognised in all its importance.

The users who chose ODF

All the people who saved in ODF format when it would have been easier and more convenient to use OOXML.

All the people who explained to colleagues, clients, and procurement officers why document format is a fundamental issue.

All the people who put up with the problems – requests for files in “Word” format and questions about compatibility – but still chose the harder but more consistent path.

All these users have kept ODF alive as a living format, not just as a specification. They have generated interoperability experiences, reported bugs and provided real-world usage data. They have demonstrated that ODF is not just a theoretical commitment but a practical daily reality for hundreds of thousands of people in every sector and every country.

All these users were, in the strictest sense of the term, ahead of their time. They were already implementing the policy that Germany has just legislated. They were practising the interoperability that the EU is now making mandatory.

And they arrived at this through personal conviction rather than institutional duty, and then held their ground for twenty years, whilst the institutions caught up with a culpable delay.

Thank you

To the funders, the members of the technical committee and the users: what is happening today at a political level is a belated public recognition of the work you have carried out in silence, without fanfare and without thanks, and silently enduring the comments of those who did not understand, or perhaps did not want to understand.

You are no longer a niche group. You are the vanguard that has proven the validity of a concept, and that has made it possible for those politicians who realised that your example was the one to follow – and not that of the lock-in loyalists – to make their case.

Today, The Document Foundation can stand before the European institutions, coalitions and the wider ecosystem, and ask difficult questions about the sovereignty of formats because you have built the foundations upon which we stand. The rest of the world is catching up to a position that you have held for twenty years.

All of this deserves recognition. Thank you.

LibreOffice project and community recap: April 2026

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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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  • And there’s more: we attended the Grazer Linuxtage and gave a talk about what LibreOffice is, where it’s going, and how anyone can get involved to improve it.

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  • We have a new developer in The Document Foundation team! Vissarion Fisikopoulos joins us to work initially on LibreOffice Base and databases more broadly, with a focus on Base itself and the ways database functionality connects with the rest of the suite.

Vissarion Fisikopoulos

  • Jiajun Xu wrote two articles looking back at the LibreOffice Asia Conf 2025, specifically the Panel: Lessons from Open Source Business – part 1 and part 2.

Panel discussion from LibreOffice Asia Conf 2025

  • LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages, but we need help maintaining the translations (and adding more). We reached out for Swahili speakers – and have already heard from volunteers, so a big thank you to them! 😊 Of course, everyone is welcome to localise LibreOffice in languages that they know…

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The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.3

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Berlin, 30 April 2026 – The Document Foundation today announces the release of LibreOffice 26.2.3, the third maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, which was released in early February. This update delivers targeted bug and compatibility fixes, along with stability improvements contributed by our global community.

LibreOffice 26.2.3 is available for immediate download at for Windows, macOS and Linux.

LibreOffice 26.2 introduced a broad set of improvements to daily productivity workflows, including Markdown import and export, connector shapes in Calc, multi-user Base, faster EPUB export, and mandatory Skia rendering on macOS and Windows for better graphics performance. LibreOffice 26.2.3 consolidates these advances with a focused set of fixes (detailed in the RC1 and RC2 changelogs), addressing issues identified by users and testers since the initial release.

Videos describing the new features of the LibreOffice 26.2 family are available on PeerTube and YouTube:

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LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project with a donation.

The LibreOffice community is also working on LibreOffice 26.8, our next major release, due in August. To assist with this, The Document Foundation is taking on new developers, such as Neil Roberts and Vissarion Fisikopoulos, with more to come. All LibreOffice users are welcome to join the project and help to make the software even better.

Insights from the InstallFest 2026 Conference in Prague

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Petr Valach from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

On the last weekend of March 2026, the regular InstallFest 2026 conference took place. Here is a summary of the news and insights we gained at the event.

New venue

What every visitor noticed immediately upon entering was the change in the location of the conference spaces. Instead of Building E in the courtyard of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering complex, visitors headed up the stairs directly inside Building A from the reception. The conference thus gained larger premises (three floors were allocated), which visitors likely appreciated, as there was no crowding anywhere.

As I mentioned in my report from the previous year, I personally prefer historic spaces over modern architecture like that of LinuxDays. Its design is also very interesting, with a certain intended rawness and practicality, but historic buildings hide their own charm and the mystery of bygone times.

However, the placement of most booths was problematic. They were (as last year) located in a single room. If visitors didn’t know about them, they wouldn’t go there on their own – they had to deliberately search and find them (although there were signs everywhere and the magnetic navigation system deserves praise). Booths should rather be placed in hallways where they are visible. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that due to echo, such placement would increase noise levels in the corridors, which could be disturbing. In any case, there were very few visitors at the LibreOffice booth – much fewer than at LinuxDays. Therefore, the list of observations will be brief.

At the The Document Foundation / LibreOffice booth

LibreOffice booth

At the booth, in addition to providing information and advice, we offered traditional promotional items such as stickers, beer coasters, and flyers. New this time were badges that visitors could pin to their lapels, and interest in them was surprisingly high.
A small contest in the form of a fill-in puzzle was again prepared for visitors. Clues were distributed across two floors where the conference took place.

Contest sheet

This year, only one member of The Document Foundation attended InstallFest. A significant reinforcement, however, was thirteen-year-old Matěj, who helped mainly with carrying things and staffing the booth. He also attended a lecture focused on FreeCAD and its related workshop (plus one more). Matthew is a high-functioning autistic with interests in physics, astronomy, photography, and IT, and he will newly contribute to LibreOffice translations. We’ll see how he does.

Workshop

Topics and insights

Just a few days before the conference, the German government issued a directive mandating the use of the ODF format in public administrations. ODF is one of the required formats (alongside XML, PDF, etc.). The OOXML format is entirely absent, meaning it is not supported at the federal level in Germany. This has clear consequences and signals a move away not only from OOXML but also from Microsoft Office, as its compatibility with ODF is not good.

This information (along with recent implementations, for example in Denmark, Austria, Schleswig-Holstein, etc.) generated significant interest among visitors. These implementations demonstrate that governments (regional or national) take LibreOffice seriously. They send a signal that LibreOffice is a high-quality suite capable of meeting governmental needs.

For this to be the case, LibreOffice must meet certain criteria. Perhaps the most important is functionality – it must be able to do what governments require. Equally important, however, is security. As we know, using Microsoft 365 (the cloud version of Microsoft Office) is problematic because it conflicts with GDPR regulations. Users do not have control over their data when using this application. This issue does not arise when using the desktop or online version of LibreOffice; here, users have full control over their data. For institutions that process sensitive personal data, this is a crucial requirement that cannot be taken lightly.

It was interesting to observe how important privacy and security are to booth visitors (mostly young students). But not only to them. One student from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University mentioned that using Google Workspace is prohibited at their school due to data protection concerns; however, it is curious that Microsoft 365 is still allowed (even though the same policy issues apply).

The students we spoke with are generally satisfied with LibreOffice and use it for standard office tasks. In addition to Writer and Calc, Impress is also used – students are satisfied with it, although it is often considered the weakest module of LibreOffice. They agreed that it would be very useful to directly label objects on slides automatically, which would improve clarity when editing animations; users would immediately see the order of actions applied to specific objects (as in PowerPoint).

One student also asked about morphing between slides (as in PowerPoint); Impress does not support this feature, and subjectively it is not essential – more of an unnecessary “visual effect.”

This time, far fewer people participated in the contest than at LinuxDays – only seven completed entries were submitted, which is even fewer than last year at InstallFest. Nevertheless, three successful participants were drawn and won T-shirts and a printed color translation of the Writer manual. As always, participants could add questions or comments – only one participant did so, with two questions:

T-shirt winners

  • The first concerned dark mode support. This is not new in LibreOffice; it can be selected under Tools | Options in the LibreOffice | Appearance section. Since LibreOffice 25.8, users can not only switch between light and dark themes but also install themes that completely change the interface colors.
  • The second question was about support for cloud services in LibreOffice. LibreOffice allows connections to various cloud services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV, and others. This option is available under File | Open Remote.

Screenshot of LibreOffice's Appearance preferences

The InstallFest 2026 conference is now behind us. We’ll have to wait until October for the next IT conference – LinuxDays 2026. Will we meet there?

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