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Category: Open Document Format

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.

The Foundation Is Strong: What TDF Is, Why It Matters, and Where It Is Going

The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one.

Sixteen years later, that premise is under pressure. And it is worth stating clearly, on the record, what TDF is, what it has done, what it is doing, and why the decisions it has made – including the difficult ones – follow directly from the founding commitment rather than betraying it.

What a Foundation Is For

Our foundation, like many others, exists to hold something in trust. Not for its current contributors, not for its most prolific developers and not for the companies that build products on top of its work, but for the public, across time. That is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is a legal and ethical obligation that governs every decision the Board of Directors makes.

In Germany, where TDF is registered, such obligations are enforced by law. A gemeinnützige Stiftung – a foundation with charitable status – operates under strict rules designed to prevent any private interest from capturing a public asset. When those rules are tested, the foundation has no discretion: it must act to protect its status, its assets, and its mission, or it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.

This is the context in which recent governance decisions must be understood. Not as a power struggle and not as the revenge of administrators against engineers, but as the fulfillment of a legal and institutional duty that TDF’s founders accepted when they chose this structure in 2010.

What Actually Happened

Over several years, independent lawyers identified two main areas in which decisions made by board members associated to ecosystem companies created conflicts of interest serious enough to endanger TDF’s charitable status.

These were not hypothetical risks or bureaucratic hair-splitting. They were documented, in writing, by multiple qualified professionals with no stake in the outcome.

Attempts to address these problems through internal policy reform began as early as 2021. A conflict-of-interest policy was introduced. However, the version that was ultimately approved was weaker than what TDF’s legal advisors had recommended. The stronger version was not approved by a board that included representatives of the companies whose conduct was in question. Unfortunately, the milder version proved insufficient.

By 2023 and 2024, the problems were confirmed in successive audit cycles. The Board’s current composition – which no longer includes employees of ecosystem companies – then proceeded to adopt governance reforms, as a change of behavior was urged for repeatedly by lawyers. Amongst the changes introduced, a bylaw provision that suspends membership for individuals whose employers are involved in legal proceedings that directly threaten the foundation’s existence.

The scope of this provision is narrow and specific: it does not apply to ordinary commercial disputes, but only to situations in which the foundation’s charitable status, assets or legal standing are at risk.

The suspension of membership for more than thirty individuals employed by one ecosystem partner followed the activation of this provision, but was announced in detail by two different messages which were clearly outlining the consequences for TDF Members.

The individuals remain welcome in the LibreOffice community. They retain their roles in the Engineering Steering Committee and other technical bodies. They are invited to TDF events. The suspension applies to formal TDF membership and the governance rights that come with it, for the entire duration of the legal consultation process.

This is not a purge. It is a governance safeguard doing exactly what governance safeguards are designed to do.

What TDF Is Building

It would be a mistake to read the current moment as purely defensive. While managing a governance crisis that it did not choose, TDF has continued to invest in the software and the community that give the foundation its purpose.

In the past twelve months, TDF’s eight staff developers contributed 4,077 patches to LibreOffice. Two additional developers have recently joined TDF staff, with one specifically assigned to LibreOffice Base, a module that has been under-resourced for years. Also, work is underway on deeper code modernization: architectural improvements that have accumulated for decades and that require sustained, focused effort rather than feature-driven patch contributions. Announcements on this work are forthcoming.

TDF is also actively developing its thinking on LibreOffice Online. The community has expressed clear interest in a genuinely community-governed online editing capability, distinct from the commercially driven fork that currently occupies that space. This is early-stage work, responsive to community demand, and it will proceed on the community’s terms.

On the standards and policy front, TDF continues its advocacy for ODF as the native document format for public administration software procurement. The Deutschland-Stack mandate, Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, and the ongoing digital sovereignty conversation in EU institutions all represent vindication of positions TDF has held and argued for years. This work – unglamorous, slow, and essential – is what a foundation does that a company cannot.

The Question of Meritocracy

The argument has been made, loudly and repeatedly in recent weeks, that TDF has betrayed the meritocratic principles on which LibreOffice was founded, that by limiting the governance role of the most prolific code contributors, the foundation has handed control to people who do not deserve it.

This argument deserves a serious answer rather than dismissal. Meritocracy, as a governance principle, requires that merit be defined in terms of the goals of the organization.

In a commercial software company, lines of code and commit counts might be reasonable proxies for value. In a public-interest foundation whose mission is to protect free software as a commons, merit includes legal compliance, community stewardship, standards advocacy, documentation, translation, user support, and long-term protection of the assets against capture by any single interest, including the most technically capable one.

The original sin of the meritocracy argument as applied here is the assumption that writing code confers the right to govern a foundation. It does not – any more than being the largest donor confers the right to direct a charity’s strategy, or being the most productive employee confers the right to override a board’s fiduciary decisions. These are different roles, each one with a different accountability, and conflating them is not a defense of meritocracy, but an argument for capture.

TDF values its developer community without reservation. It is investing in growing that community, both inside the foundation and across the broader ecosystem. But a foundation even partially governed by the people associated with its largest commercial contributor is not a foundation but a subsidiary.

The Road Ahead

LibreOffice is healthy. Its codebase is actively maintained, its release cadence is regular, its user base is growing in the sectors – public administration, education, and civic infrastructure – where free software matters most. The governance difficulties of recent months have been painful and public, but they have not compromised the software.

TDF is not complacent about the challenges ahead. The competitive landscape is more demanding than ever. Microsoft’s AI integration, although problematic under many points of view, raises the stakes for interoperability. The digital sovereignty moment in Europe creates both opportunities and obligations. The foundation’s technical roadmap must match the ambition of its policy positions.

What TDF will not do is resolve these challenges by abandoning the principles that make it worth defending. The foundation holds, not out of stubbornness, but because the alternative is to become something that no longer serves the purpose for which it was built.

Sixteen years ago, a group of sixteen people decided that the world needed office software that belonged to everyone. That decision has not aged at all. It has, if anything, become more important, and TDF exists to honor it.

Let’s put an end to the speculation

Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation.

Unfortunately, we have to start from the very beginning, but we’ll try to keep it brief. The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. After all, it was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28, 2010, the date of the announcement.

At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then like IBM would create Apache OpenOffice to kill LibreOffice. Also, if the project were to be successful, it would require resources greater than those available, and above all, a deep management experience.

Fortunately, the project grew quite rapidly. However, the founders’ different backgrounds and opinions were at the same time the reason for some bold decisions – many of which right – as well as a few mistakes, which are the root cause of some of the current problems:

  • granting free use of the LibreOffice brand only to companies in the ecosystem, to allow them to sell the software in Microsoft and Apple’s online stores;
  • awarding contracts for the development of LibreOffice – new features, fixing “legacy” bugs, etc. – to companies whose representatives were on The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, and who were active throughout the procurement process.

Both of these decisions were found to be incorrect for reasons relating to the non-profit law, to which The Document Foundation must adhere. They violated the law itself. When this fact was brought to the attention of the Board of Directors by the foundation’s legal counsels, the companies that had benefited from these errors sought to maintain the status quo rather than finding a solution. At the time – from the end of 2021 to the middle of 2022 – this could have been achieved swiftly and with minimal difficulty.

This attitude increased tensions within the BoD, adding to pre-existing frictions that began in 2020 when the majority of the new board decided to terminate the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets to a parallel organisation called The Document Collective (TDC). Several issues that the current board had to solve stemmed from elements of that project that had been partially executed.

The origins of TDC are controversial. One reason given for setting up the parallel organisation was the “alleged inefficiency” of the TDF team [1], which was expressed by some of the directors. Unfortunately, instead of addressing the supposed problem with a reorganization or some training, the BoD decided to react by creating a new problem: a parallel structure with a supposedly “highly efficient” team that would highlight the alleged inefficiency of the TDF team.

TDC was presented at the LibreOffice Conference in Almería in 2019 without prior notice, raising concerns within the team and the community. This was partly because the parallel organisation’s project envisaged leveraging TDF’s financial resources as startup funds. This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, and especially between certain BoD members and the team.

After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the German authorities overlooking non profit foundations requested an audit whose results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non-profit status, with unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, the presence of company representatives on the Board of Directors (BoD), who were elected by employees of those same companies that are also TDF members, caused further delays to finding a solution, which has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures – such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees – and the freezing of tenders, alongside the introduction of a robust procurement policy for development, has resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit [2]. At least, the BoD has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.

The board also reviewed governance issues from the past and set clear rules to minimise the risk of them recurring in future. These rules are set out in the Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties, the updated Conflict of Interest Policy and the Community Bylaws.

Of course, if we could rewind the course of history, some of the choices made since 2010 would hopefully be different and no one would repeat the mistakes or the wrong behaviours of the past.

As we said at the beginning, we would gladly have done without this post, but it was necessary to set the record straight and avoid speculation.

TDF has been preparing for some time for Collabora’s announcement, by hiring developers and exploring new partnership opportunities to support a growing interest in LibreOffice on the desktop, still a viable option for many deployments, the cloud and mobile, and in ODF as the preferred document format for governments worldwide.

Thanks to the growing importance of free and open source software, as well as open standards for document formats, the concepts that we have been advocating for over twenty years and have finally reached political institutions and users, The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project are well positioned for the future.

[1] The Document Foundation’s daily activities are managed by a team of employees and contractors who handle administrative tasks, infrastructure, release management and developer’s mentoring, and coordinate community, quality assurance, UX, documentation, localization and marketing.

[2] The first audit in 2023 raised concerns about the mentioned issues. The second audit in 2024 confirmed the concerns. The third audit in 2025 did not raise concerns.

Document formats: a mystery to many

Euro-Office’s announcement – which sees IONOS, Nextcloud and other companies coming together to create a European alternative to office productivity software – has predictably sparked a wave of comments. Most of these focus on the issue of licensing: is the code open source? Who controls the repository? What are the conditions for forking, modifying or implementing it?

While these are all valid questions, they fail to address the most important issue. The fact that almost no one is asking the question that matters tells us something significant about how the debate on digital sovereignty has been framed and who benefits from that framing.

A licence tells you who owns the software, while the format tells you who owns the data

A licence can be renegotiated, modified or updated. The history of FLOSS is full of projects that have changed governance models, divided communities, or changed course under new management. Licence terms are important, but they operate at the level of the software artefact.

The native document format operates at a completely different level. It is the encoding level of every document produced, archived, and exchanged by institutions that adopt the software. It is the invisible structure of administrative memory within which public documents exist for years, or even generations. It is the infrastructure.

If Euro-Office is supplied with OOXML as the default native format – even if it is wrapped in an open licence, hosted on European servers or governed by a European legal entity – every document drafted by public administrations, schools and institutions will be written in a format designed around the behaviour of a single vendor’s application.

OOXML is governed by a specification that is so complex and internally inconsistent that it compromises interoperability. As if that were not enough, it is optimised for backward compatibility with Microsoft Office rather than for seamless exchange between systems.

The licensing issue asks: who controls the code? The format issue asks: who controls the data? These are not equivalent situations. The latter has long-term implications for public archives, administrative continuity, and the practical significance of vendor independence.

For thirty years, the FLOSS and digital rights communities have been working on licences based on the fundamental principle that a licence equals freedom. This work has produced enormous value, but it has also created an unintentional blind spot.

Microsoft has spent decades conducting one of the most effective user education campaigns in the history of the software industry. However, what it has taught is dependency. Consequently, a generation of users, administrators, developers and even FLOSS advocates has grown up treating OOXML documents as the natural unit of document exchange — just like water flowing from a tap. OOXML files are not perceived as a lock-in mechanism, but as normal documents.

This is an incredible strategic achievement. Microsoft has managed to transform a proprietary file format, which was designed to replicate the behaviour of its own applications rather than enable transparent content exchange, into an interoperability standard.

Compatibility with the OOXML format is not viewed as a courtesy to the monopoly holder; rather, it has become a feature that alternative software must provide to prove its legitimacy. Lock-in has been transformed into an advantage: users are not trapped in Microsoft’s format; they are simply using the format that everyone else uses.

The FOSS community, which should be particularly vigilant about such dynamics, has often uncritically accepted Microsoft’s approach. Indeed, when evaluating an alternative productivity suite, the first question is often about the ability to open OOXML files rather than about the native format and whether it enables interoperability. Unfortunately, the alternative is judged according to criteria subtly dictated by Microsoft.

Consequently, format policy is treated as a secondary technical issue rather than the major political issue it really is. Meanwhile, Microsoft has pursued a precise and successful strategy of securing OOXML certification as an ISO standard to define it as ‘open’, while ensuring that licensing issues take precedence over format issues.

The result is that “supporting ODF” has become a box to tick rather than a specific commitment. This explains why all office suites today claim to support ODF. The practical implications of this support – such as whether ODF is the native or default format, or the format in which documents are created and stored without user intervention – are rarely considered, let alone addressed.

The test that matters

Euro-Office presents itself as a genuine European alternative: an infrastructure project for digital sovereignty. This claim deserves to be put to the test in terms of whether institutions will manage to free themselves from Microsoft lock-in, or if they will simply reproduce it under a different banner.

The test is simple and admits only one answer: ODF will be the native format of Euro-Office; the format in which documents are created, stored, and exchanged by default without user configuration or technical intervention.

Not: Euro-Office supports ODF because, in a nominal sense, everything supports ODF. Users can save in ODF format because this is a compatibility feature, not a commitment to true digital sovereignty.

If the answer is yes, then Euro-Office represents a significant structural break with the dominant proprietary format. However, if the answer implies “compatibility”, “user choice”, “transition paths” or “broad format support”, then Euro-Office is, regardless of the licence, a server migration that leaves Microsoft’s lock-in on data unchanged.

Digital sovereignty is not achieved by changing who hosts the software, but by changing the format in which data is encoded. European institutions, public administrations, and civil society organisations considering Euro-Office deserve a direct and immediate answer to this question before making any further commitments.

ODF has to be native, default, and by design.

Since its foundation, the Document Foundation has supported ODF as an open standard for document exchange. ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) is the only document format standard designed from the outset to ensure interoperability, long-term preservation, and total vendor independence.

Euro-Office: sovereign in name only, or in reality too?

The announcement of the Euro-Office is welcome news. The coalition is credible, the governance is sound and the timing is perfect. Europe needs office software, and The Document Foundation is delighted to see such significant players allocating resources to make it happen.

However, we have a question. It is not meant to be hostile, but it is the only question that matters.

What is the native document format of Euro-Office?

The press release promises full compatibility with Microsoft formats. We are well aware of the logic behind migration: organisations moving away from Microsoft need to be certain that their documents will survive the transition. But “full compatibility with Microsoft formats” is certainly not a definition of sovereignty, but rather the definition of a different kind of dependency.

OOXML is a format designed, controlled and managed solely by Microsoft. Building a European office suite prioritising compatibility with OOXML means ensuring that the European document infrastructure remains subordinate to architectural decisions made in Redmond. The hosting moves to Europe, but the lock-in remains in Redmond.

The alternative exists, is mature and is a law in several European jurisdictions. ODF, the Open Document Format, is an ISO standard developed through an open and transparent process, which is not controlled or managed by a company. The German Deutschland-Stack has made it mandatory, and the EU Commission has approved it. It is not the LibreOffice format, but a European public good.

The Euro-Office press release does not mention ODF even once.

We are not asking Euro-Office to abandon support for Microsoft’s proprietary format. LibreOffice itself reads and writes OOXML: compatibility is a necessity for users, not an ideological concession. We are asking whether ODF will be the native format, the one in which documents are created, archived and exchanged between European public administrations.

This distinction is fundamental, and the time to define the native document format is now, before the architecture is finalised and the implementations take place. If necessary, we are here to help with the deployment of the ODF standard as native document format.

The coalition has the credibility and resources to build something truly innovative. We hope it will use them to build a project of sovereignty and not merely a tool for server migration, flying a European flag but with a lock-in firmly rooted in Redmond.

The Document Foundation is a non-profit foundation and the home of LibreOffice, the world’s leading open-source office suite. LibreOffice implements ODF as its native format and supports a wide range of document formats, including the import and export of OOXML.

Open Letter to European Citizens

The door to digital sovereignty is open, please come in

For decades, a community of developers, activists, researchers and public officials has quietly worked on the idea that free and open-source software based on open standards is not only the best technical choice, but also the only one compatible with democratic governance.

We have created the necessary tools, overseen migrations and provided user training. We have also drafted policy documents and presented them to committees.

We have documented the consequences of public documents being readable only by software developed in a single country, managed by a single company and subject to the laws of a different jurisdiction, as well as the commercial decisions of a board of directors.

The French gendarmerie, the Austrian Ministry of Defence and the German state of Schleswig-Holstein – to name but a few examples – have taken action, alongside regions, provinces and cities across Europe.

We have always been here, and not with a product to sell, but with the knowledge, patience and sincere conviction that public institutions belong to the public, and that this also applies to their digital infrastructure.

Sometimes we were listened to, but far more often we were merely tolerated, at best with a smile that seemed to say: “I know, but what can I do about this?”

And now, suddenly, the situation has changed, and not because the arguments have changed – there was no need for that – nor because the technology has changed, as it was already excellent.

The situation has changed because the geopolitical balance has shifted, and the dependence that once seemed a convenience now appears for what it has always been: a structural vulnerability.

We are glad that this moment has arrived, and we like to think that this clarity – which the evidence never managed to achieve – is also down to us, and not just the geopolitical crisis.

But we ask European citizens, and through them those who govern European countries, to understand one extremely important thing: the door to digital sovereignty does not open simply by choosing different software, but by understanding what sovereignty actually entails.

It requires open document formats, not as a preference, but as a legal and technical guarantee that a document produced today will be readable in thirty years’ time, by any compliant application, without the permission of any company. The format is not a detail, but the foundation.

It requires open fonts, because a document displayed differently on different systems is not an interoperable document, regardless of the standard it claims to follow. The display layer is just as important as the data layer.

It requires continuity of expertise: the people and institutions that have carried out this work, often without recognition and sometimes without resources, are not a lobby to be managed but a valuable repository of knowledge to be engaged.

It requires honesty about what “open” means. A coalition that speaks of digital sovereignty but chooses as its default document format one designed to replicate the behaviour of proprietary software is not building sovereignty but a new dependency under a different banner.

We have been here for years, and we will still be here for years to come.

The FLOSS ecosystem did not need a geopolitical crisis to believe in open standards. We have always believed in them, because they are right—technically, legally, and democratically.

Now that Europe is ready, we have just one request: listen to us carefully, unlike what you have done in the past. The lesson is not simply “use free and open-source software”. The lesson is: understand why it is important, and understand it thoroughly.

The tools exist, the knowledge exists, and above all, the community exists.

What happens next will depend solely on you: Europe’s digital sovereignty could become a genuine architectural commitment or remain yet another rebranding of dependency.

We hope, and would like to be sure, that you choose the first option.

Over the coming weeks, four articles will explore these topics in depth: the architecture of document formats, the hidden politics of font rendering, lessons learned from real-world migration experiences, and what a credible European policy on open standards would actually look like. We invite you to read them.

Press Releases

The Document Foundation announces the simultaneous availability of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6

Berlin, 26 March 2026 – The Document Foundation today announces the simultaneous release of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6. These…

Open Document Format

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…