LibreOffice broke a record by leaving AI out. A million people were escaping it.
Your office software can now change what it does with your data overnight, and you find out by opening it.
Last week, more than a million people voted on how they feel about that.
LibreOffice 26.8 was installed 1,031,162 times in its first seven days, from the official site alone, before you count the Linux app stores where most of its users live. It is the biggest first-week number the project has had in over a decade. And the maintainers were blunt about the reason. They published a post titled "Yes, no AI is now a feature."
Sit with that. In 2026, the selling point was the absence of something.
Here is what most people are misreading. This is not open source finally beating Microsoft on price. LibreOffice has been free for fifteen years. Free did not move a million people in a week. Something changed on the other side of the fence.
Inside Microsoft 365, Copilot has stopped being a product you evaluate and become the default you opt out of. It shows up in the apps you already pay for, it reads across your documents to do its job, and the bill keeps drifting upward around it. Nobody on your team asked for that. It was a change to the suite, and your files became the surface it runs on.
It gets worse for anyone still paying for that suite. The million people who left got to make a choice. You do not get to make the reverse one. There is no setting that turns the old deal back on and keeps it, no version you get to freeze, because the software lives on someone else's servers and changes when they decide it changes. The absence of AI is now something you can only buy from a vendor who isn't selling you anything.
This is the mechanism underneath it. In software you rent, a new feature is not an offer. It is an edit to a contract you already signed, made by the other party, effective immediately.
A million downloads is the first clean signal that this carries a cost. People will leave a thirty-year incumbent, relearn every shortcut, and accept a rougher product to run something that does only what they tell it to and sends their documents nowhere.
I run my own work this way on purpose. I'm not against the technology. I just want to be the one who decides when it touches my data, and rented software keeps taking that decision away from me.
Your office suite will get its AI. A million people just showed what it looks like to opt out while you still can. When your tools change under you next, will you get a say in it, or just find out by opening them?
