Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC

Berlin, July 17, 2015 – The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of LibreOffice and many other applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC. ODF defines a technical schema for office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations. “ODF 1.2 is the native file format of LibreOffice. Today, ODF is the best choice for interoperability, because it is widely adopted by applications, and is respected by applications in every area”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “ODF makes interoperability a reality, and transforms the use of proprietary document formats into a relic of the past. In the future, people will tell stories about incompatible document formats between two releases of proprietary office suites, as a bygone problem”. ODF is developed by the OASIS consortium. The current version of the standard was published in 2011, and then was submitted to ISO/IEC in 2014. The standard is available – in three parts: schema, formula definition and packages – from the repository of Publicly Available Standards as a free download from the following links: Schema: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c066363_ISO_IEC_26300-1_2015.zip Formula Definition: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c066375_ISO_IEC_26300-2_2015.zip Packages: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c066376_ISO_IEC_26300-3_2015.zip The standard is also

ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS standard

ODF 1.2, the document format adopted by LibreOffice, has been approved as an OASIS standard. Although we are still waiting the formal OASIS announcement, there have been a dry email by Chet Ensign and a more enthusiastic post by Rob Weir who provide several details about the story. Amongst the TC members who have contributed during the process, Rob lists two TDF founders – Thorsten Behrens and Charles Schulz – and an extremely active and well known LibreOffice core developer: Kohei Yoshida. Standard document formats are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.

Why a digital document is a piece of software, and what that means for your freedom

Most people, including many competent software developers, think of a digital document the way they think of a sheet of paper: an inert object that holds words and pictures, indifferent to the tool used to open it. This intuition is wrong, and the consequences of getting it wrong shape everything from vendor lock-in to cybersecurity to the long-term readability of public records. A digital document is not paper. It is a piece of software. The HTML parallel The clearest way to see this is to think about a web page. When you visit a website, your browser receives a file – an HTML document – and executes it. It parses the markup, applies styling rules, runs embedded scripts, fetches additional resources, and assembles the result into something you can read. The page you see on screen is not a static image transmitted from the server, it is the output of a small program that your browser ran on your behalf. Nobody disputes that a web browser is software. Yet the HTML file it consumes is also, in a meaningful sense, software: a set of instructions describing what should happen when the file is opened. Change the instructions, and the rendered

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 25.8.7

Berlin, 12 May 2026 – The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.8.7, the final maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.8 family, available for download at www.libreoffice.org/download [1]. Users of LibreOffice 25.8.x should update to LibreOffice 26.2.x as LibreOffice 25.8’s end of life will be on June 12, and after that date the software will not receive additional security updates. LibreOffice 25.8.7 is based on LibreOffice Technology, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – either from TDF or from the ecosystem – that fully supports the two document format standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP), and the closed and proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. For enterprise-class deployments, TDF recommends a LibreOffice Enterprise optimized version, with dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years. Additional details at: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. English manuals for the LibreOffice 25.8 family are available for download at books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the

Insights from the InstallFest 2026 Conference in Prague

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

LibreOffice Asia Conf 2025 – Panel: Lessons from Open Source Business, Part I

Jiajun Xu writes: The annual community event LibreOffice Asia Conference was held on December 13-14 2025 in Tokyo, Japan. One of the sessions was a panel discussion titled “Lessons from Open Source Business,” moderated by Franklin Weng, featuring three company leaders from different countries sharing how they run their businesses with open source tools. This article covers the first part of the panel: the business introductions. (Note: photo credits: Tetsuji Koyama, CC BY 4.0) Business Introductions Germany: Lothar Becker and .riess applications The first to present was Lothar Becker from Germany, Managing Director and owner of “.riess applications.” The company primarily operates in Europe, providing consulting services based on open source solutions. Lothar described himself as not being development-oriented, but rather focused on client relationships and consulting — a personal trait that has shaped the company’s direction. As a consulting firm, a defining feature of .riess’s business model is that it does not charge for technical support or long-term support licensing fees. Instead, they productize their expertise as consulting services. This means .riess operates on a people- and time-based revenue model, which does not lend itself to the kind of exponential revenue scaling that SaaS companies achieve through near-zero marginal