It’s kind of weird that OpenAI doesn’t sponsor LibreOffice

Simon Willison recently pointed out that OpenAI’s Codex desktop app (now just rolled into the ChatGPT desktop app) bundles a headless LibreOffice install in its cache directory. This is not surprising. I’ve seen the ChatGPT web app use LibreOffice to create .docx reports all the time.

What is surprising is that I can find no evidence that OpenAI provides any financial support to LibreOffice or its steward, The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is great software that I’ve used since switching to Linux about a decade ago (I even vaguely recall using its predecessor OpenOffice some time around when Canadian high schools were finally transitioning away from WordPerfect).

Obviously OpenAI thinks it’s great software too, given that it bundles LibreOffice specifically to help its agents work with some of the most popular file types people ask them to create.So why not throw the maintainers a bone?

There’s nothing unusual about this situation, of course. Huge corporations have long profited off of free and open source software while contributing little in return. The most famous case of this is probably OpenSSL, the software securing much of the Internet that until 2014 received only $2,000 in annual donations and supported a single full-time employee (they also sold commercial support contracts to raise money). A massive security flaw called Heartbleed finally got companies to step up.

Maybe the rise of agents will finally cause OpenAI to step up and support the open source projects on which it relies. Or maybe they’ll just vibe code alternatives to them.