We wrote an office suite and gave it away

Rutba Office is a desktop suite: mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, slides, 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 two network calls

There is nothing to sign into. Your documents never leave the machine: no sync service of ours, no cloud tier, no crash reporter, no document telemetry. Calendar and Contacts can keep in step with a CalDAV or CardDAV server, but only one you add yourself. 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.

The suite makes exactly two network calls of its own, 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. And once a day at most, the launcher asks office.rutba.io whether there is an announcement worth showing you, sending the version and the name of your operating system, and no identifier of any kind. That second one is also the only usage figure we have: the server can count that a copy was opened somewhere today, never that this copy was. Both are settings, and turning either off means the request is not made at all. Mail, and since 1.29.8 Calendar and Contacts, talk to the servers of accounts you add, and only to those.

A privacy page that undercounted its own network calls 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 nine 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.