Five layers, then: format, rendering, fonts, time, price. The first three are technical and largely invisible. The last two are not technical at all, and they are the ones the user feels most directly, in a migration deadline he did not set, in a subscription cost he did not agree to. Listing them together changes the character of the argument. Lock-in is no longer a catalogue of technical grievances of interest mainly to specialists. It is a complete account of dependency, and it reaches every part of how a person works: what his documents are made of, when his tools will stop being supported, and what he will be charged for them.

What unites all five is a single absence: the user has no exit. He cannot take his documents elsewhere without loss because of the technical layers, he cannot escape the vendor’s calendar or its pricing because of the other two. Every one of these dependencies is only possible because there is no door.

That is why I have spent this series on formats, and on rendering, and on fonts, and now on calendars and invoices. They are not separate complaints. They are the same observation seen from different angles, and the observation is this: an open format and a free application are not, in the first instance, about cost or ideology. They are an exit, they are the door that makes every one of these dependencies optional rather than fixed. The Open Document Format and LibreOffice do not promise that you will never depend on anyone. They promise something narrower and more important: the dependency is one you have chosen, and one you can leave.

A vendor’s calendar will always move. A vendor’s prices will always rise. These are not scandals, they are simply what it means to be governed by someone else’s strategy. The only question that matters is whether you are free to walk away when they do. Everything in this series has been an argument that you should arrange your affairs so that you can.

There is a sophisticated mechanism by which proprietary technology ecosystems maintain their grip on users and institutions, even when those users and institutions believe they are making free choices, using open standards, and building independent digital infrastructure.

The mechanism does not work through force, but through a subtler and more durable strategy: the layering of dependencies, in which each layer obscures the one beneath it, so that when the system fails the apparent cause is something other than the real one.

It is a structural pattern with identifiable components and predictable failure modes, and with a single political consequence: the systematic attribution of interoperability failures to open alternatives rather than to the proprietary dependencies that actually cause them.

Understanding all of this is essential for anyone working on a genuine interoperability policy, because without it even the best-intentioned policy interventions address the visible symptom while leaving untouched the larger problem of the underlying architecture, which goes on working exactly as designed.

#libreoffice #odf #ooxml

Dear office suite users,

In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010.

These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty.

It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile.

If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept the flag of open-source office suites flying when everyone was predicting their demise, and who continued to develop the only truly open and standard format that guarantees Digital Sovereignty, as it provides full user control over content.

Document formats are a subject still rife with misinformation. This is understandable on the part of Microsoft, which developed and controls the horrible proprietary OOXML format, designed precisely to prevent Digital Sovereignty by maintaining content lock-in. It is far less understandable on the part of companies that claim to advocate open source, such as those promoting Euro-Office.

Euro-Office defaults to the fully proprietary OOXML document format, developed and controlled solely by Microsoft. This makes it a de facto ally of Microsoft in its content lock-in strategy, with control remaining firmly in Redmond and far from Europe.

So, despite what is being written in support of Euro-Office — the latest of the office suites developed in Europe, and not the first — the announcement is not against Microsoft. On the contrary, it strengthens Microsoft’s strategy against European Digital Sovereignty, or, if you prefer, against the freedom of European users to control and manage their own content.

Executive Summary

This proposal suggests restarting LibreOffice web, mobile, and cloud development by structuring the project into a set of independent initiatives. Each initiative can be pursued separately from the others, and their deliverables will be useful improvements to LibreOffice even without the other components.

• Responsive user interface
• Web distribution based on desktop version using WebAssembly
• Mobile distributions based on desktop version
• Document server and integration
• Client-server collaborative editing

One of the greatest risks to large software projects is schedule slip due to dependencies between components. By structuring the project as independent initiatives with separate deliverables, rather than a single monolithic project, we can reduce that risk. This approach also calls for a high level of code sharing across the desktop, web, and mobile versions, which will reduce both our initial development and long-term code maintenance costs.

The result of this project will be a blended web, mobile, and cloud offering and development strategy, which will signal to the public that LibreOffice is on a clear trajectory toward achieving technical parity with the major commercial office suites. In lieu of invasive first-party cloud service integrations, we will aim to offer server components that are lightweight and inexpensive to host, and make it easy for users to work with multiple server providers.

Please note that this document is intended as a strategy proposal, not as a technical specification or project plan. Technical and planning commentary in this document should be considered speculative. Additional work is needed to prepare concrete implementation plans for each initiative, should we choose to proceed with this strategy.