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The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

simonwillison.net

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Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#62

Post by telotortium »

pseudosavant wrote: post #2

Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.

I have a skill that instructs ChatGPT/Codex to verify the rendering using the Mac versions of Microsoft Office. Even without registering, you still can open files read-only, which is enough. Apparently Office refuses to open some Open Office XML documents that LibreOffice is fine with, so that's another reason to use this. After a few times, Codex ended up storing some memories to stop producing broken files in the first place.

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...

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#63

Post by TZubiri »

zamadatix wrote: post #59
vb-8448 wrote: post #41

Curiously, I didn't find any reference in the Open source licences section of the codex app. Is this a MPL 2.0 violation?

Despite the title, I'm not sure it's actually bundled. Some of the skills plugins will download it on the first run. So it depends where they are grabbing it from rather than the presence of the binary on the system, but I haven't checked that deep into where they actually grab it.

The license itself may be present in the cache folder.

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)"

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#64

Post by zamadatix »

JLO64 wrote: post #12
pseudosavant wrote: post #2

Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.

For a docker image of mine I was bundling the full version of LibreOffice as well but I managed to get some space savings by bundling just the no-gui version.

Seems to match the screenshot in the blogpost but libreoffice-headless still shows as 429.7 MB.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#65

Post by paaloeye »

First Claude installed 10GB VM [0] without asking, but OpenAI ships LibreOffice. What's next? Somebody ship their monorepo verbatim?

Honestly, 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.

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#68

Post by tmp10423288442 »

nikanj wrote: post #30
nomel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of time, for a an average session, do you think is app overhead vs waiting for tokens? And there's your answer for why it's not a priority.

From OpenAIs perspective, resources on your computer are free and wasting them is inconsequential

Kind of. Eventually it gets too slow even for the OpenAI engineers using it, and then they need to fix it.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#69

Post by ChickeNES »

tyre wrote: post #48
verdverm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not computer use or using the tools the user prefers instead? The primary office suites have APIs/CLIs now

Computer use is slow and can take control of the application focus. I’ll be doing things while Claude runs in the background. Suddenly it decides to open the app and try to do something + screenshot it.

I don't know how many times I've had to yell at codex or claude to use/implement headless versions of whatever it's doing at the time, interrupts me trying to multitask and play Battlefield or Factorio while they work :P

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#70

Post by TZubiri »

quotemstr wrote: post #20

There's no security benefit to doing this versus demand-downloading hashed-locked components on need.

Ok, it's probably not a security decision. It's a common pattern with both storage and memory management to push most reservations to initialization, in order to cluster resource insufficiency errors to a specific install-time when the user or admin can do something about it. An excessive just-in-time approach in both storage and memory would cause OOM and Disk exhaustion to occur at many different times.
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