In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.
Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.
And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.
People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine...
In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear.
> In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo.
Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.
Perhaps it's time for you to become familiar with the terms of the Mozilla Public License, under which Libre Office is released. There is no requirement for monetary compensation.
They chose -- explicitly, voluntarily, knowingly -- to give the thing away for free. That's their right for their own creation. Your preferences don't supersede theirs.
By profiting off their work and not supporting them you are making your own choice. It says nothing about the authors' preference.
I don't see it making much sense to bundle it. I'm sure a LOT of LLM prompts are related with docs, excels, powerpoints etc, etc but don't really see it worth it for it to be bundled on the codex app from the get go, because otherwise, why not also install dozens of other apps?
% ls ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/dependencies/native/libreoffice-headless
libreoffice manifest.json
PS C:\Users\user> ls C:\Users\user\.cache\codex-runtimes\codex-primary-runtime\dependencies\native\
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
d----- 8/27/2026 10:09 AM git
d----- 6/16/2026 9:18 PM jxrlib
d----- 8/26/2026 7:37 PM libheif
d----- 6/17/2026 5:32 AM poppler
d----- 8/27/2026 10:09 AM powershell
I also saw this present after first run on macOS but not Windows.
More notably, I don't use Computer Use or any of the fancy features, just Codex for agentic coding.
because other apps are less likely to be useful, and there's diminishing returns
It's not surprising that it's pulled in absolutely massive dependencies, although I'm not sure it's the wrong call on some operating systems. LibreOffice is pretty tried and true.
However, all of this is confusing:
- the ChatGPT/Codex split on desktop
- Chat/Work split on mobile
- how you remotely access each chat from your phone (some of my most valuable chats are buried in Remote)
- which chats propagate from device to device, and which remain on that device
Istg on windows, I can't get codex app, new chatgpt or chatgpt classic to work without hanging on even a moderately sized chat. I tried all of the different tricks people recommended but that shit just crawls. It was stable at some point, classic that is, but then it started being a laggy mess.
I've uninstalled new chatgpt/codex app. I can't access phone chats on it, I can't use the desktop allocated chat messages on it. I have to use up codex limits. I am so surprised that OpenAI ships that hot garbage on windows.
But even on the Windows machine, if you Tailscale into a free tier VM for the workloads, you'd probably have a much better time.
Just leave Codex itself on your machine, if you set up computer use it will happily set up all of this for you while you have lunch.
..like excuse me? Where the fuck else would we post feedback about it?
If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.
I generated the skill originally for ChatGPT 5.5, so some of these may not strictly be necessary anymore with later models. But posting here in case others find it useful: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba...
What's the alternative library you see?
The goal of bringing in dependencies is so you don't have to duplicate the functionality, in this case, crafted over decades of effort.
[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/SDKGuide/C...
I did the exact same thing in my AI system. Spent an ENOURMOUS amount of time trying everything I could and in the end libre was the only thing even somewhat functional.
Easily 2 months of my life lost to these god forsaken systems. APIs and CLIs sound reasonable until you actually attempt anything in this space.
Computer use is exactly the same thing. Go try this: go to a google doc and dev tools check out the dom and now do the same for a word doc. Eye gouging pain of trying to get anything to work.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/getting-start...
whether they like it or not spreadsheets word docs etc are just ubiquitous parts of existing in society at this point you're gonna need to reach for these tools eventually just to apply for jobs or do homework
And I suspect we will look back at MS with nostalgia once Altman and Musk get their ai imperiums.
But I have a license for the entire office 365 including Copilot premium.
Guess why?
Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents.
https://www.news18.com/business/satya-nadella-announces-micr...
They bet on the online office suite (M365).
[1] https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust [2] https://fastpotify.rocks/
Why?
Is this a MPL 2.0 violation?
Alternatively, ChatGPT might happily disclose authorship and licensing if asked.
I'm not convinced of the argument that the fact that it is not bundled at download or even at install-time, would free them of the GPL responsibilities. And at this point.
I'm also not sure HOW the devs bundled libreoffice, whether they just mentioned in a prompt (use libreoffice), or whether they hardcoded a command (like apt install libreoffice), more likely the former, considering the recursive vibecoding nature of this software.
Whole lotta words to say that I don't know whether this is a GPL violation, but interested in the answer. If it is a violation, the likely fix will probably be yet another prompt that says something like "comply with licensing", which probably already exists, so a more specific "provide attribution (in a way that doesn't bother the user)"
I don't need a lot of words to say it can't be a GPL violation since Libreoffice is distributed under the MPL v2.0 license.
~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/dependencies/native/libreoffice-headless/libreoffice/LibreOfficeDev.app/Contents/Resources/LICENSEHonestly, not sure it's worth having those app on your localhost at all. I ended up uninstalling all frontier labs bloated apps and start using Google AI Mode + Antigravity CLI / Claude Code sometimes.
...
For those that can't see the sarcasm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
I am unsure the direction that AI assisted document creation work will go in. I am opinionated and building something in the space. In this reply I discuss my view + what I have been building.
My opinion is: We now have AI, this new amazing flexible tool. We can throw it at any problem. But in terms of document creation we have a choice between old fashioned siloed document formats (.pptx, .pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and a freshly rendered - slightly randomly styled - html site with some basic javascript within it. I think these combinations are odd and do not maximise the powers of AI.
I've been building something called SmallDocs [0][1] which is a new take on work documents. It's all Markdown, but it always renders (100% privately) on the SmallDocs site. This means the SmallDocs renderer can convert recognised Markdown combinations into powerful traditional document formats [2]. For example, we convert a ```cells block into an in-line spreadsheet you can export to Excel.
This gives an agent the ability to express itself with a great deal of depth and flexibility. For example, your agent can produce a single data analysis "SmallDoc" with text, charts, spreadsheets, etc. [3] I find that combining formats quickens the speed I can understand a topic.
SmallDocs also have standardised and pretty boring styling. This means you spend less time understanding the layout of a flashy HTML page and more time on the content.
I also believe a pre-determined rendering engine has a lot of advantages over a freslhy built HTML artifact. It allows you to build in lot's of useful defaults that the agent doesn't have to code from scratch. These can be small things, for example, every time your agent renders a Markdown table in SmallDocs you can instantly copy it as a CSV or a PNG. And these can be bigger things, such as a rich slides DSL with solid styling defaults, which saves your agents a lot of tokens and results in consistently attractive HTML slides [4]. (Slides can also be automatically exported to .pdf and .pptx.)
I've been at it for a few months, and am still working on the project. I am looking for feedback and open source collaborators. Thanks for reading!
[1] https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs
[2] https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc
[3] https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8...
[4] https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWp...
(And something totally different, your agent can also use SmallDocs to walk you through code files: https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUX...)
If they succeed with AI it will be huge: it's basically not possible to do it today with humans, no matter how many people you put on the job.
It would be impressive of AI to make a 80% rewrite, though I fully doubt it would cover the 100% rewrite (disregarding long term support as well).
Why do you think it’s impossible for humans to rewrite word, especially even humans made it in the first place?
These guys puposely obscure controls and understanding of these products 100% to prevent you doing a port.
Just go open a microsoft word doc in the browser and look at the dom.
Despair! Horror!
They purposely obscured, google doc is another example they completly hide the dom!
I spent months fighting word processing systems and ended up shipping libre. There's almost zero alternatives without that becoming your entire company.
(Also, "Rust or native" is a strange dichotomy. What's not native about Rust?)