FOSDEM 2025 LibreOffice is a big, mature chunk of code now, but that doesn’t make it impossible to teach it impressive new tricks. Some of them could make it more important than ever.

The open-source office suite had its own program stream at FOSDEM, including the pre-announcement of the new LibreOffice release 25.2. It has been around in some form since 1985, so this version marks its 40th year. It’s middle-aged and, almost inevitably, that means it’s big, a bit saggy in places, it definitely has some issues, and it doesn’t look as good as it did a couple of decades ago.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be taught interesting things. Even a 40-year-old can acquire new skills and take on entirely new roles.

One of these was the subject of a talk by Allotropia’s Thorsten Behrens, Distributed real-time collaboration for Writer – a first prototype. This is a mode where multiple people, each with their own local copy of LibreOffice Writer running on their own machine, can all work together simultaneously on the same collaborative document. There’s a little more info in his slide deck [PDF], which explains that this is achieved using CRDTs, or conflict-free replicated data types – the same tech whose use we described in the Zed programmer’s editor last year.

It’s the same sort of functionality that you get from Google Docs, and indeed this is already possible using the Collabora Online web-based version of LibreOffice. The big difference is that such tools run in a browser, so you need to be online. What makes the CRDT implementation different is that this is a local app, working on a local file, but using a network copy to keep changes in sync. The idea is to free you from keeping your apps and data on someone else’s computer, without losing the handy collaborative features that web apps bring.

We also met up with Thorsten for a demo of one of his other babies, ZetaOffice. This is a version of LibreOffice built for the Wasm runtime, which means it can run inside a bro