LibreOffice Promotes Free, Endless Support

With Microsoft Office 2021 exiting support in October, The Document Foundation is promoting LibreOffice as a better alternative. This free, full-featured office productivity suite has no end-of-support date and doesn’t require endless subscription payments.

“On 13 October 2026, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021,” The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli writes. “No more security updates, no more fixes, no more assurances. The software will still launch. It will still open your files. But from that date it becomes a liability rather than an asset, and the only sanctioned path forward runs through a subscription.”

LibreOffice isn’t exactly a new alternative to Office and Microsoft 365, of course. It started in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org that was itself a fork of the StarOffice suite that dates back to the 1980s (though most tie it to Sun Microsystems and its late 1990s releases). But two things have changed over all those years. LibreOffice has gotten dramatically more capable, mature, and compatible. And in this era of Big Tech enshittification, Microsoft is pushing customers inexorably to its Microsoft 365 subscriptions and endless monthly or annual payments.

The allure of LibreOffice is real. It has no end-of-support date, it’s open source software, and each release can upgrade, for free, to the latest version.

This is not how Microsoft Office works, Vignoli says.

“The distinction matters more than it appears,” he writes. “Microsoft’s lifecycle policy is a commercial instrument: The date is chosen, not discovered. It marks the moment when continuing to use software you paid for becomes unwise, and it exists to convert perpetual licenses into recurring revenue. LibreOffice cannot issue such a date because no one holds the authority to issue it.”

The other issue with Office and Microsoft 365 is their document formats, which Microsoft uses as cudgels to help prevent customers from leaving the platform. Though the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) formats are ISO standards, they’re purposefully not precise designs that require those implementing them to approximate compatibility, which makes document round-tripping–editing them in different apps–difficult and leads to the degradation of those documents.

LibreOffice works with OOXML formats, of course, but it defaults to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) open file format that guarantees compatibility through a “public, complete, and readable” specification. “The consequence is simple,” Vignoli says. “If your archive is in OOXML, your ability to read it depends on a commercial relationship with a single company continuing indefinitely. If your archive is in ODF, it does not.”

LibreOffice is developed and maintained by The Document Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Berlin, Germany. You can download it for free for Windows 11, Windows 11 on Arm, Mac, and Linux (in Arm and x86 formats and RPM and DEB package formats at libreoffice.org.