Category: LibreOffice

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 name is itself an oxymoron: XML stands for eXtended Markup Language, which is open by definition, but OOXML’s syntax is so complex that it is unreadable even to advanced users. The format was deliberately designed to become a sophisticated lock-in tool at a moment when Microsoft’s other strategies had already been uncovered and analysed.

The Transitional/Strict bait-and-switch

OOXML was approved as an ISO standard through a process that was an affront to transparency, ethics, common sense and respect for users. The format is documented in a way that discourages consultation – over 7,500 pages – and is developed by Microsoft behind closed doors in Redmond.

It is not versioned. It uses no independent standards. On the contrary, it relies on proprietary Microsoft formats wherever possible, in some cases formats that Microsoft itself had deprecated because the market rejected them. It is not even compatible with the Gregorian calendar. The XML schemas are nearly absurd in their complexity.

The bait-and-switch worked like this: “I swear it will be Transitional until 2010, very proprietary and very little of a standard, and after that only Strict, not very proprietary and very much a standard.”

The catch: Strict never materialised in practice. For years it lingered as a last-resort option that no one was meant to use, and it has now disappeared from the Save As options altogether. The standardised version of OOXML – the one ISO was told would become the real format – no longer exists as a user choice. Only Transitional remains.

A pity, because we would have had a laugh with Strict’s bugs. Excel has a thing for getting dates wrong (the (in)famous 1900 leap-year bug, inherited from Lotus 1-2-3 and never fixed), and when Excel gets dates wrong, no other software does it worse.

The political consequences

All of this is hard to grasp by looking at what happens on screen, because the document seems entirely harmless in its apparent simplicity. And yet all of it has been documented in detail since OOXML was first introduced, by independent experts who should have been heard, both by ISO and by those working in advanced technology.

Instead, ISO bought the Transitional/Strict story. And once ISO believed it, governments and politicians believed it too, rushing to adopt OOXML as a document format for fear that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer might take offence and act accordingly.

In doing so, they placed citizens’ private data in Microsoft’s hands and reinforced a monopoly that was already evident before OOXML’s arrival, and that has become increasingly difficult to dismantle ever since.

The Microsoft ecosystem played its part in all this, and partner companies – SAP foremost among them – have always done everything in their power to push their users toward OOXML for data exchange, openly obstructing the use of the standard ODF format. An uneven struggle, by design.

Worse still, with just a few exceptions, even those who by virtue of their expertise should have recognised OOXML as the cornerstone of Microsoft’s new lock-in strategy fell for it. Some still write today: “we have to accept it, OOXML is an ISO standard.” This is not a serious position.

It is a deference with no rational basis.

Microsoft’s monopoly position is not founded on technological superiority but on the strategic foresight of Bill Gates and the lobbying machinery that flowed from it, deployed well ahead of its time.

The same deference has had consequences in the scientific community as well.

The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee was forced in 2020 to rename dozens of human genes – including SEPT1 and MARCH1 – because Excel kept silently converting their symbols to dates. Rather than going to Microsoft and demanding a bug fix, scientists preferred to throw years of established nomenclature down the drain to avoid upsetting Redmond. A revealing precedent.

Supporting ODF is not choosing ODF

There is a distinction that needs to be made plainly, because it is too often blurred, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design. Supporting a format is not the same as choosing it.

An office suite that saves OOXML by default is not supporting digital sovereignty, independently from the level of ODF support. It is an OOXML suite with an ODF import/export filter, which inherits all the OOXML based lock-in mechanisms: proprietary schemas, vendor-controlled evolution, hidden binary fragments, format-level dependencies on Microsoft’s roadmap.

Digital sovereignty lives at the native-format layer. Support describes what a piece of software can read. Native format describes what it is. The native format determines the legal and technical character of every document the user creates.

A commitment to “improve ODF support” is not a commitment to digital sovereignty. It is a commitment to keep ODF as a guest in someone else’s house.
This distinction matters for any project, coalition, or procurement decision that claims a digital sovereignty objective. The meaningful question is never whether ODF is supported – it almost always is, at some level – but whether ODF is the native format, chosen and committed to as such.

If the answer is anything other than yes, the sovereignty claim is provisional at best.

What digital sovereignty actually requires

The only viable path to digital sovereignty today is to use ODF as the native document format, and OOXML as the interoperability format for exchange with users who – out of lack of information, or pure convenience – continue to use the proprietary format, and share ownership of their own files with the vendor.

Anything else is false digital sovereignty. Control over a document and over the information it contains depends first on the format and only afterwards on the location of the server.

Standard, open format: the user is in control. Proprietary format: the vendor is in control, even if the document sits on a PC on the user’s desk.

This should be self-evident to anyone working in open source software, because it follows directly from its principles.

A proprietary document respects neither Freedom 1 (the freedom to study and modify) nor Freedom 3 (the freedom to improve and redistribute), as it is not not documented in a way which makes the source code readable and it is not developed through a transparent process.

The decision to adopt OOXML as the native format runs counter to the interests of governments, supranational bodies, organisations of every kind and enterprises. But above all, it runs counter to the interests of users as it exploits their lack of information rather than investing in their education and in their digital sovereignty.

The choice of native format is not a technical detail to be deferred or finessed. It is the choice. Any project that treats it as something less is not supporting digital sovereignty. Full stop.