The Internet, October 4, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) publishes some details of the security fixes included with the recently released LibreOffice 3.4.3, and included in the older 3.3.4 version. Following industry best practice, details of security fixes are withheld until users have been given time to migrate to the new version. RedHat security researcher Huzaifa Sidhpurwala identified a memory corruption vulnerability in the code responsible for loading Microsoft Word documents in LibreOffice. This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted file. The corresponding vulnerability description is CVE-2011-2713,”Out-of-bounds property read in binary .doc filter”. LibreOffice 3.4.3 also includes various improvements to the loading of Windows Metafile (.wmf) and Windows Enhanced Metafile (.emf) image formats that were found through fuzz testing. LibreOffice developers have developed some additional security patches and fixes. These are part of a general set of development improvements which are reflected in the overall quality and stability of the software. Most LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes have been developed by Caolan McNamara of RedHat and Marc-André Laverdière of Tata Consultancy Services. “Working on fuzzing LibreOffice import filters has been a great experience, and I am glad I could contribute in
Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, also known as the Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente (EDCA), came into force on 17 March 2026. It is one of the world’s most comprehensive digital child protection laws, with profound implications for the Brazilian education system. School administrators, IT managers, and education policymakers now have a legal obligation to consider every technology product deployed in classrooms. LibreOffice, the FOSS office suite developed and maintained by The Document Foundation, is uniquely positioned to meet these obligations by design. What the law actually requires The EDCA establishes that every IT product or service directed at children and adolescents – or “likely to be accessed” by them – must guarantee their integral protection, prioritise their best interests and maintain the highest level of privacy and data security (Art. 3). Among the law’s key requirements are: Privacy by default and by design. Products must operate at the highest available level of data protection as a default setting, and any reduction in protection must require explicit, informed consent (Art. 7). No behavioural profiling. Any form of automated or manual profiling of minors based on behaviour, preferences, economic status or location is subject to strict limitations (Arts. 2(V) and 26).
Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from a working group, but a mandate backed by the federal government and the coalition agreement. The official document has been published by the IT-Planungsrat, the central political steering body comprising the federal government and state governments, which promotes and develops common, user-oriented IT solutions for efficient and secure digital administration in Germany: https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/b-2026-03-it. At this point, the question for all other European governments is clear: what are you waiting for? With this decision, the distinction between those who care about digital sovereignty and those who do not becomes stark. There are no more excuses Over the years, public administrations in Europe have accumulated a series of tired excuses, long since overtaken by the facts, for not making standard and open document formats mandatory. Let’s examine them one by one. ODF isn’t mature enough. ODF has been an ISO standard since 2006. It is now at version 1.4, with active development,
Join us in Pordenone, Italy, to share what you are doing for and with LibreOffice, how you are integrating LibreOffice in your infrastructure, how you are using LibreOffice to achieve Digital Sovereignty, and how LibreOffice can be used in Education. The Document Foundation invites TDF Members, contributors and the wider FOSS community to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s LibreOffice Conference that will be held in Pordenone, Italy. The event will take place from the 10th to the 12th of September, with an informal community meeting on September 9, and collateral events (in Italian) targeted to Italian enterprises and public administrations on September 9 and September 11. Proposals should be filed by June 15, 2026 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program. Please provide an abstract of your talk, and a short bio of yourself. These will help organizers in selecting the talks, and putting together the conference schedule. The conference program will be based on the following tracks: a) Development (APIs, Extensions, Current and New Features) b) Quality Assurance and Software Security c) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects d) Appealing LibreOffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility e)
Every year, millions of students open a laptop and log into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, surrendering their digital sovereignty to US Big Tech in the process. Teachers use cloud-based editors to assign homework. School administrators manage documents in proprietary formats. This ecosystem runs smoothly and seemingly without friction, but almost no one questions the cost of this normalisation. Unfortunately, the cost is quite high. An invisible resume Schools don’t just teach maths and history; they also teach mental processes, such as how to do research, think critically and interact with tools and institutions. Software is part of this invisible curriculum. A student who has spent years using Microsoft Word or Google Docs as the archetype of “word processing” or “collaboration” respectively has not developed neutral, transferable skills, but has become a future customer. This is not a conspiracy, but rather the way markets work. Microsoft and Google both offer heavily discounted or even free licences to educational institutions, knowing that brand loyalty formed in childhood tends to persist into adulthood and the working world. The licence discount is, in commercial terms, the cost of acquiring a new customer, which schools effectively pay on behalf of the seller. LibreOffice offers
Berlin, 19 February 2026 – LibreOffice 25.8.5, the fifth update to the FOSS office suite [1] developed by volunteers for personal productivity in office environments on Windows, MacOS and Linux, has landed at www.libreoffice.org/download. LibreOffice 25.8.5 is based on the highly robust LibreOffice technology platform, which supports the development of desktop, mobile, and cloud applications from both TDF and ecosystem companies. The platform supports all available document formats for full interoperability: the native, open and standard ODF (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and the cloud. For enterprise-class deployments, versions are available from ecosystem companies, with SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years. English manuals for the LibreOffice 25.8 family can be downloaded from books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can access volunteer based technical support via mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice forum: ask.libreoffice.org/. All desktop versions of LibreOffice can be downloaded from the same website: www.libreoffice.org/download/. To improve interoperability with Microsoft Office and 365, users should install the Microsoft Aptos font from this webpage: typography/font-list/aptos. LibreOffice enterprise and
