We wrote an office suite and gave it away

Rutba Office is a desktop suite: documents, spreadsheets, slides, mail, pictures, image editing and video, in one download. It reads and writes .docx, .xlsx and .pptx on an engine we wrote ourselves. It is free, under the AGPL, for anybody, for anything — and there is no account, no sign-in, and no usage data collected at all.

People reasonably ask what the catch is. There is a commercial reason, it is not hidden, and it is at the bottom of this post. First, the part that is actually hard.

The formats nobody else opens

A .pst is not a folder of emails. It is a single-file database with its own allocation scheme and its own B-trees, and Microsoft’s specification for it runs to a couple of hundred pages. That is why so little software outside Outlook can read one, and why "just export it" is advice that assumes you still have a working Outlook to export from.

Our mail application opens .pst and .ost directly. We test it against a real 906 MB .ost — 467 folders, 12,172 messages — and index it in under a second.

That is the part we are proud of, and it is also the part that explains the licence. An engine that reads those formats correctly is worth something to other software companies. Giving it away to people is not the same decision as giving it away to competitors, and the AGPL is how those two get different answers.

Why the AGPL, specifically

The AGPL says: use this freely, change it freely, and if you build on it and offer that to others, your changes are free too. For a person opening a spreadsheet, that is indistinguishable from "free". For a company wanting to embed our document engine in a closed product, it is a real constraint — and that is where a commercial licence exists.

• Individuals and businesses using it: free, permanently, with no seat count and nothing to register.
• Companies embedding the engine in closed software: a commercial licence, because the AGPL would otherwise require them to open their product.

No account, and one network call

There is nothing to sign into. Your documents never leave the machine — no sync, no cloud tier, no crash reporter, no document telemetry. Mail passwords go to your operating system’s keystore rather than to a file the application can read back. Message bodies render in a sandbox that cannot fetch anything, so a tracking pixel cannot report that you opened the message.

There is exactly one network call, and we say so rather than claiming zero: an installed copy asks GitHub whether a newer release exists, twenty-five seconds after launch and every six hours after that. It carries nothing about you. It is a setting, and turning it off means no request is made at all.

A privacy page that omitted the one network call would tell you exactly how much the rest of it is worth.

The commercial reason

Rutba sells business software — CRM, accounting, stock, payroll, email. Almost nobody has heard of us. A free desktop suite that does something genuinely difficult is how a company with no reputation demonstrates that it can build, to people who have every reason to be sceptical.

That is the trade, stated plainly: you get seven applications and an engine that opens your old archives; we get the chance to be judged on the code rather than on the marketing. If it is any good you might look at what else we make. If it is not, you have lost a download.