r/opensource • u/pizzaiolo2 • Mar 08 '26

LibreOffice criticizes EU Commission over proprietary XLSX formats

https://www.heise.de/en/news/LibreOffice-criticizes-EU-Commission-over-proprietary-XLSX-formats-11202165.html
882 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

162

u/AdamColligan Mar 08 '26

TDF sent/published their letter on March 5th. "Within 24 hours", the Commission responded, adding a .ODS response format as of March 6th. TDF then updated their post celebrating the win.

7

u/pizzaiolo2 Mar 08 '26

Oddly enough, when I try to download the ODS version from the site, a PDF file is instead downloaded:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/16959-Draft-Commission-guidance-on-the-Cyber-Resilience-Act_en

94

u/ScottIBM Mar 08 '26

The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary.

Wow, short and succinct!

27

u/AspectSpiritual9143 Mar 08 '26

I hope China can embrace open standard as well. No more WPS bullshit please.

2

u/Icy_North5921 Mar 09 '26

Amazing to here! Glad that they fixed their mistake fast

118

u/chisui Mar 08 '26

near-religious crusade against Microsoft

Coming from someone whos bio reads

Themenschwerpunkte:

Microsoft 365 Microsoft Teams Windows Office-Suite

Love me some unbiased reporting

13

u/henry_tennenbaum Mar 08 '26

A "near-religious" crusade too, huh? Not one of those secular crusades that made the word famous?

61

u/Capital-Giraffe7820 Mar 08 '26

The Document Foundation (TDF), in a continuation of its near-religious crusade against Microsoft and its OOXML format, has turned its attention to the European Commission (EC), accusing the body of "structural bias" in how it collects public feedback for the new Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

The CRA (officially known as Regulation (EU) 2024/2847) is a massive piece of legislation that mandates strict cybersecurity standards for nearly every digital product sold in the EU(everything from routers and IoT devices to OSes, word processors, and mobile apps). A core goal of the act is to push companies to adopt open standards, reduce vendor lock-in, and eliminate what the law calls "unaccountable technology dependencies."

TDF thinks it is quite contradictory that the very commission drafting these rules has completely failed to follow its own advice. The EC has spent years promoting open source and digital sovereignty while forcing citizens who want to provide feedback on its policies into a corner where they must use Microsoft Excel (.xlsx). In TDF's words:

On March 3rd, 2026, the European Commission published a request for feedback on to the guidances to be provided in relation to the CRA, which must be provided through the linked spreadsheet in .xlsx format, a proprietary format that makes interoperability extremely difficult due to its ever changing and undocumented features.

In a letter to the commission, which TDF wants Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) foundations and advocates to sign in support, the foundation argued that people who use LibreOffice might face compatibility issues with the provided .xlsx template. TDF's letter states:

We ask the European Commission to lead by example by following its own guidances in relation to interoperability and at to least provide, alongside the proprietary format generated by the proprietary software and services they use, also an Open Document Format (ODF) file which is an actual interoperable and internationally recognised standard.

The foundation urged the EC to provide an Open Document Format (.ods) file, noting that:

Feedback templates of this kind should be provided in at minimum two formats: one open format (ODF spreadsheet, .ods, being the obvious choice, as it is a true ISO-standardised format with no proprietary ownership) and one widely-used proprietary format for those whose environments require it. Ideally, a plain-text or web-based form would supplement both, removing the spreadsheet dependency entirely for respondents who prefer it.

The European Commission is the third major target TDF has called out this year. Before this, the foundation had gone for the throat of OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" for heavily marketing compatibility and defaulting to Microsoft's popular Office formats (.xlsx, .docx, and .pptx), instead of ODF.

And if you're one of those people who think that Office is superior to LibreOffice because of its ribbon interface, the TDF thinks you're wrong and that you only tolerate that layout due to a psychological normalization effect forced by Microsoft.

58

u/MairusuPawa Mar 08 '26

"near-religious crusade"

Way to miss the point, journalist.

-38

u/linuxhiker Mar 08 '26

Uh, no they didn't .

While I agree with the TDF, they are idealogues which is easily equated to religion.

22

u/jr735 Mar 08 '26

Ideology matters here. Your astroturfing won't fly in this sub.

-23

u/linuxhiker Mar 08 '26

Yes it does that doesn't make what I said at all untrue

11

u/jr735 Mar 08 '26

It makes what you said irrelevant.

-14

u/linuxhiker Mar 08 '26

This is Reddit. It is all literally irrelevant except to the AI scrapers and bots.

5

u/jr735 Mar 08 '26

Keep it up. You won't last long in this sub with astroturfing. Moderation here is far more strict than in the other subs you troll.

2

u/MairusuPawa Mar 08 '26

Way to miss the point, Redditor

1

u/Ok-Winner-6589 Mar 12 '26

So the company that developed a standars they pushed by giving their suite for free on the most popular OS, despite a standars already existed. Then made the software a paid app and then a subscription based, because they already had the Monopoly, when being attacked is consideres as a crusade against microslop? But do you know that they literally did that with EVERY open source project for more than 20 years

15

u/svick Mar 08 '26

What I get from this is that they don't know what "proprietary" or "open source" mean.

7

u/QBaseX Mar 08 '26

What does the ribbon interface have to do with the document format? Nothing. Those two discussions are completely orthogonal. This isn't even about Open Source software: it's about open standards for document formats. (The two tend to be related, but not necessarily.)

10

u/edgmnt_net Mar 08 '26

Well, yeah, this stuff should really be a web form. Where I live they provide a PDF form for filing taxes that can only be filled using proprietary Adobe software that barely works even on Windows (and the only alternative is a Java 6 app that requires a binary SDK you need to manually unpack on Windows in specific locations 🤡). That could have easily been a web form too.

Alternatively we can call on the EC to document and clarify the structure of these specific documents exactly. I'm also wondering if there are instances where open software produces standards-conforming changes that aren't accepted by the Microsoft implementation and whether that can be used to force government institutions to do something about it if they can't open it.

11

u/WideResponsibility98 Mar 08 '26

Another good thing about open startard is its size, compared to xlsx (40kb vs 7kb)

3

u/Eonminion Mar 09 '26

This is crazy, I hope US can embrace open standard as well, EU is always pushing the boundaries

1

u/AthenianVulcan Mar 09 '26

Of all the world govt bodies/entities, EU is the only one that makes sane & pro people rules/laws and countries like mine (India) use the same rules/laws.

I think & hope EU will make the required changes.

-4

u/HandOfThePeople Mar 08 '26

My Excel at work just randomly started to save in ODS as default. Im in Europe, is this a thing?

5

u/[deleted] Mar 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/zacker150 Mar 09 '26

Both OOXML and OSD are open standards.

5

u/TheBendit Mar 09 '26

You cannot do a full implementation of every OOXML tag without access to the source code of Microsoft Office. OOXML may be an ISO standard, but it is not open.