Rutba Office after its first thirty-one releases: what closed, what is open, and who should wait

Rutba Office 1.0.0 went out on 8 September. By 21 September there had been thirty-one releases, and 1.25.0 is the one an installed copy is running today. They did not arrive one a day: nine on the first day, then two, four, three, six and seven, on six days out of fourteen. The timeline has every one, with the notes written the day it went out.

Each release post in this series says what arrived. This one does the less comfortable thing: it takes the list of what was missing, written on 9 September, and reads it back against what shipped — including the parts that did not.

The list we wrote on day two

On 9 September we wrote down, from the code rather than from memory, what stood between the suite and something a person could use for everything. It lives in the repository as docs/GAPS.md, and it ends with ten items in the order they should be built. Read back today, with the difference between a release and the source kept honest:

Six of the ten are wholly in an installer you can download. The other four are partly or wholly in the public source, written and tested, and waiting for the next release. That distinction matters more than it looks: a feature in the repository is a feature a developer can build, not one a business can install, and a post that blurred the two would be doing the thing we test against — claiming more than a real file would bear out.

What is still open

The same document keeps the gaps nobody has started on, and these are the ones a business notices first:

• The old binary formats. A .doc, .xls or .ppt is read as text — an approximation, and the window says so — and never written.
• Password-protected files. An encrypted .docx, .xlsx or .pptx is refused with a sentence saying why, rather than opened.
• OpenDocument drawings. A chart or a shape in an .ods, and a picture or a shape in an .odp, are left behind. The same file as .xlsx or .pptx keeps them.
• Mail merge, equations, an index and a bibliography in Rutba Word.
• Languages. Every word of the interface is English, and right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew is not built.
• A proper spell-check pass and an accessibility checker.

And three things that are not on the list because we decided against them rather than ran out of time: macros are preserved in the file and never run; there is no co-authoring, no server edition and no cloud storage; and there are no phone or tablet apps. Those are choices, and the comparison page says which suites to use instead if you need them.

Windows only, and not yet signed

Every one of the thirty-one releases carries a Windows installer and a portable build, and nothing else. Our own launch note on 8 September said Windows, macOS and Linux; that was what the build can produce, not what the release page offered, and it should have said so. On a Mac or a Linux machine the suite is built from source today, and the download page says exactly that.

The Windows files are not yet code-signed. Signing has been granted to the project through the SignPath Foundation’s programme for open-source software, and until the first signed release ships, SmartScreen warns on first run. That warning is telling the truth, and an IT department is right to ask about it.

Who it is already enough for, and who should wait

Enough, today, for somebody holding an Outlook .pst or .ost and no Outlook to open it with; for a Windows machine with no Office licence that needs to open, edit and print everyday documents, workbooks and decks; for a machine where an account or telemetry is not acceptable; and for anybody who wants a file that arrived as OpenDocument to leave as OpenDocument.

Not yet, for a team that writes documents together; for a fleet of Macs or Linux machines without somebody to build from source; for a finance team whose workbooks depend on macros or Power Query; for right-to-left languages; or for an organisation that will not install anything unsigned. We would rather you waited than switched and found one of those the hard way.

Compared by somebody else

We are the wrong people to rank our own suite against the established ones, so we will point you at a comparison written from the same public record. TrustList — the business software directory, which is part of Rutba, so read it knowing that — counted our releases, formats and test figures and set them against Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, LibreOffice, Apple iWork and Thunderbird, each checked on its vendor’s own pages: how fast Rutba Office is closing the gap on the established office suites. It says plainly that it is not an independent review, and it ends with a method for trialling any free office suite in a business, ours or not.

If the question underneath is how a free suite pays for itself at all, the same series has a piece on how software products make money in 2026, and our own answer is in why nobody sells an office suite any more.