Who are we?

LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software, and is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is free and open source software, originally based on OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and is the most actively developed OpenOffice.org successor project.

LibreOffice is developed by users who, just like you, believe in the principles of Free Software and in sharing their work with the world in non-restrictive ways. At the core of these principles are the four essential freedoms and the tenets of The Document Foundation’s Next Decade Manifesto [PDF].

We believe that users should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software that we distribute. While we do offer no-cost downloads of the LibreOffice suite of programs, Free Software is first and foremost a matter of liberty, not price. We campaign for these freedoms because we believe that everyone deserves them.

We seek to eliminate the digital divide and empower all as full citizens, support the preservation of mother tongues, and avoid proprietary software and format lock-in. We work to attain our goals by

• providing unfettered access to our office productivity tools at no cost
• encouraging the translation, documentation, and maintenance of our software in one’s own language
• promoting and actively participating in the creation and development of open standards and Free Software via open and transparent peer-review processes

Though the members of our community hail from many different backgrounds, we all value personal choice and transparency, which translates practically into wider compatibility, more utility, and no end-user lock-in to a single product. We believe that Free Software can provide better quality, higher reliability, increased security, and greater flexibility than proprietary alternatives.

The community behind LibreOffice is the heart of the project, without which we would not have the resources to continue developing our software. The passion and drive that every individual brings to the community results in collaborative development that often exceeds our own expectations. With dozens of different but essential roles in the project, we invite everyone to join us in our work and help us to make LibreOffice known and accessible to all.

The statutes of The Document Foundation, developed by our own community members, guide the way we work and encourage new members to contribute in a way which benefits both the whole community as well as themselves. Through the use of copyleft licenses such as the GNU Lesser General Public License, Mozilla Public License, and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, we commit to protecting your rights as developers and content creators.

Interested in seeing who has already contributed to the LibreOffice project? Please visit our Credits page. We hope to see your name there soon!

To learn more about how the community protects your rights and how the non-profit The Document Foundation shepherds projects like LibreOffice, please see our Privacy Policy and Legal Information.

Learn more about our community

Check out our community map to find LibreOffice community members near you!