LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features
LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26, became the software's most popular update ever, with over 1 million downloads in its first week (excluding Linux distro updates). The Document Foundation (TDF) credits the surge to its stance against bundling generative AI, citing privacy concerns. In a post titled "Yes, no AI is now a feature," TDF clarifies it doesn't reject AI outright but requires it to meet principles like user control, no telemetry, and no vendor lock-in. For now, it recommends community plugins for AI integration. The move challenges the industry trend of embedding AI, suggesting room for AI-free alternatives.
For the foundation, “an AI assistant justifies a price increase and strengthens the case for keeping all documents within its own infrastructure,” referring to companies that rely on selling subscriptions.
- smokel
The number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time, due to growing popularity. Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless.
Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
- Aurornis
I found this graph of LibreOffice downloads https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads
Switching to the monthly view, the downloads are actually mostly flat going back to 2019
I can believe that the downloads record has been broken in the same way that the stock market hits record highs all the time because the long term trend is upward.
I don’t see anything to suggest that LibreOffice is seeing a sudden surge in popularity or that lack of AI features is driving a surge of downloads.
- hn_submit
Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers. Not having / using A.I. may even become a unique selling point in the future.
- rietta
This is awesome! I have used LibreOffice (and Open Office) extensively for decades now. It is my real office suite I use for real work and real business accounting tasks. Yes, I am very well aware that Calc is different than Excel but it can get nearly all the same tasks done as long as you are not tied deep into a corporate environment passing Excel-specific files around. I have also made great business uses of it in Docker too, generating perfect PDFS from templates, and normalizing document formats for analysis. I donate a modest $19/month personally to the foundation, much rather pay them than Microsoft!
- jgbuddy
Could also be due to the fact that every codex install includes a copy of libreoffice
- panzi
The article says LibreOffice is almost 20 years old. Well, before it was LibreOffice it was OpenOffice in 2000 and before it was OpenOffice it was StarOffice and StarWriter originates in 1985. So you could say it (or the Writer component) is 41 years old.
- injidup
Let's use AI to test the validity of an AI generated clickbait article.
Fable 5.1 was presented with the following prompt to do research.
> https://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-n... states an interesting causality. Generate an artifact that tests this claim. Is it causal or coincidental. ie if libreoffice downloads have been increasing every release then it's possible to claim any recent feature change is responsible for the download. You need to get access to the download stats and then see what other major features could be responsible
https://funny-taffy-f8d6c0.netlify.app/
Conclusion is that the claim is speculative.
(This post was meat written. The report is AI generated content. )
- library8848
It's also used as a headless office document editor by openai models so... does that impact their metrics?