LibreOffice 26.2.5 is available for download
Berlin, 23 July 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.5, the fifth maintenance update to…
The non technical dependency layers: the Calendar and the Invoice
Earlier in this series I described the invisible architecture of lock-in as three stacked layers. A document depends on its format, which depends on a rendering engine to become visible, which depends on the fonts that give it its final shape. Each layer is a dependency the user rarely sees and almost never chooses deliberately, and together they explain why “just open it in something else” so often fails. The argument has always been structural rather than moral: it does not matter whether the vendor is benevolent or predatory, because the dependency exists either way. Two pieces of news from late June give me occasion to extend that architecture. They are not, at first glance, about formats at all. But read structurally, they reveal two further layers of dependency that sit on top of the technical ones. Layers I left implicit until now because the technical case was enough to make the point. It is worth making them explicit, because they complete the account of what dependency actually means. The first piece of news: Microsoft has extended free security updates for Windows 10 by a further year, to October 2027. The original end date for consumer support was October 2026.