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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

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

ODF is the future, OOXML is the past

Whenever a user, a government, a school or a business chooses the format in which to store and exchange its digital documents, it is not merely making a technical decision, but is placing a bet on the kind of digital infrastructure on which it will depend in the future. In this sense, ODF and OOXML are not two equivalent options on the same shelf, but two radically different solutions: one geared towards a future of openness, interoperability and digital sovereignty, and the other towards a past of defending a vendor’s dominant market position through user lock-in. ODF: designed to be open and transparent Open Document Format was conceived from the outset to be an open standard. It was designed and developed by the community under the auspices of OASIS, and subsequently ratified by ISO, to be implemented by anyone, on any platform, without royalties, without hidden dependencies and without the permission of any single company. These are not trivial technical details, but a statement of political and economic strategy embedded within the format itself. ODF is based on a clean XML schema, easy to read even by non-technical users and reusable. Colour naming follows standard web conventions, and its architecture

BIG NEWS: Germany has just made the standard Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory

The German federal government has quietly taken an extremely significant step: hidden amongst the technical specifications of the Deutschland-Stack – the rules that will govern the sovereign digital infrastructure supporting public administration at all levels of government, from federal ministries to local council offices – there is a short but highly significant line. Under the technological pillar “Semantic technologies and real-time analysis”, the document mandates the use of just two document formats: ODF and PDF/UA. That is all. Two open, vendor-neutral formats, defined by international standardisation bodies. OOXML, Microsoft’s closed, proprietary format, is not on the list. What is the Deutschland-Stack? The Deutschland-Stack is the German federal government’s project for a sovereign, interoperable digital infrastructure that complies with European standards. It is neither a pilot project nor a policy discussion paper, but the result of a coordinated decision between the Digital Minister, the Federal Chancellery and the Chancellor, backed by the coalition agreement. The document sets out the standards that will govern how all federal public administrations, at all levels, build, procure and manage their digital systems, and envisages concrete implementation by 2028. It is worth reading its architectural principles carefully. “Made in the EU first.” Reduction of lock-in effects.

Germany’s Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards

The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, welcomes the inclusion of the Open Document Format (ODF) as a mandated standard format in Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal government’s sovereign digital infrastructure framework for all public administrations. The Stack, published by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung), establishes the technical standards for a shared, interoperable and sovereign digital infrastructure serving all Germany’s public administrations. Under the framework’s “Semantic Technologies and Real-Time Analytics” pillar, ODF and PDF/UA are explicitly named as the two mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.” The Deutschland-Stack is grounded in a set of principles that align with TDF’s long-standing advocacy positions. The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage,

IMPORTANT ODF Template added to CRA Guidance feedback

Last week, the European Commission published the draft guidelines for the CRA and opened a comment session open to all stakeholders until the end of March. In its first version, the consultation page allowed users to download the draft guidelines and related communication in PDF format, and the feedback template in proprietary XLSX format only. For this reason, we protested through a post and an open letter to the European Commission, asking that the feedback template also be provided in the open and standard ODS format. Within 24 hours, officials from DG CONNECT—responsible for the CRA—responded positively to our request and added the template in ODS format. This is an important first step towards the interoperability that proprietary formats do not allow, and indeed seek to limit by making the DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats increasingly different from a standard with the addition of unnecessary complexities. To all those individuals who insist on considering OOXML a standard because it has been approved by ISO, and to all software that supports OOXML by using it as the default format, we remind you that you are going against not only your own interests but also the interests of all citizens of the

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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 25.8.7

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Open Document Format

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…