LibreOffice Writer
Word Processing Germany
Free desktop word processor with native DOCX read and write support. Alternative to Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
Details
LibreOffice Writer is the word processor in the LibreOffice suite, developed by The Document Foundation in Berlin and released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, installs locally, and costs nothing — there is no subscription, no account and no seat count.
It reads and writes .docx natively alongside its own OpenDocument format, and carries the features that make a word processor usable for real work: paragraph and character styles, master documents, tracked changes that interoperate with Word’s, comments, a mail-merge wizard, a bibliography database, and macro scripting in LibreOffice Basic, Python and JavaScript.
Three things do not carry over from Word. VBA macros will not run — the Basic dialect is similar enough to read but not to execute Word macros unchanged. There is no live co-authoring; collaboration happens through files and track-changes, or through Collabora Online, which puts the same engine in a browser. And there is no official mobile app.
Round-trip fidelity on .docx is strong for ordinary documents and imperfect for complex ones; heavily styled corporate templates, SmartArt and intricate numbering are where differences show.
About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation is the German charitable foundation behind LibreOffice. Its imprint names the entity at Winterfeldtstraße 52, 10781 Berlin and states its legal form outright — a “gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts”, a charitable foundation with legal capacity under German civil law — with VAT number DE 295589870 and supervision by the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Justiz und Verbraucherschutz, Stiftungsaufsicht.
The legal form settles the ownership question rather than merely answering it. A German Stiftung has no shareholders and no members who own it, so there is no parent to chase and no cap table to flip. The board of directors is elected from the project’s own contributors, and the foundation is funded by donations and corporate sponsorship rather than equity.
It was founded in 2010 when the OpenOffice.org community left Oracle, and it also hosts the Document Liberation Project, which builds converters out of proprietary file formats into ODF. LibreOffice itself ships under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is free in both senses; several companies, Collabora among them, sell support and derived products built on the same codebase.
