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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

Q&A about Media Articles and Forum Comments

Over the past week, a number of articles have appeared in the media and comments have been posted on forums containing questions – some explicitly stated and others implied – directed at The Document Foundation. We have done our best to gather all these questions and provide a response that clarifies The Document Foundation’s position regarding the claims made in a couple of online posts and the resulting inferences drawn by readers who are only partially informed of the facts. Some of the questions may sound weird such as the one about all developers having left the project, which is not true but is a clear consequence of the intentionally biased framing provided by some people to damage The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. With this Q&A document, we aim to provide clarity, although much of this information has already been provided in the past on this very blog, and all the data cited is available on The Document Foundation’s website (specifically, organisation, governance, ledger and annual report), on TDF dashboard (data relating to development and related activities) and on TDF Matomo site (data relating to downloads). TDF Website: www.documentfoundation.org/ TDF Dashboard: dashboard.documentfoundation.org/ TDF Matomo Instance: matomo.documentfoundation.org/ TDF Annual Reports: https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/

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

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

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

Document Freedom Day: because the format is the message

  Every year, on the last Wednesday in March, the open-source community celebrates Document Freedom Day. It’s an excellent opportunity to pause for a moment and ask a question that seems technical but is actually deeply political: who controls your documents? The answer depends almost entirely on the file formats you use. A freedom that is easy to overlook When you write a letter, draft a report or create a spreadsheet, you are producing something that belongs to you: your words, your data, your work. But if that content is locked into a proprietary format, whose specifications are controlled by a single vendor, subject to change without notice and readable only by software that vendor chooses to certify, then your ownership is, at best, conditional. Open document standards exist to remove this restriction. Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard adopted by LibreOffice and the wider free software ecosystem, ensures that your documents remain yours: today, tomorrow and twenty years from now, regardless of the software vendor or subscription model. This is no minor convenience. It is a structural guarantee of autonomy. The political dimension Document Freedom Day is not just a celebration for developers and system administrators. It is

Press Releases

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…

Open Document Format

There is no digital sovereignty without ODF

Any other choice is a choice of dependence on a single vendor Digital sovereignty begins with the document format. Everything…