The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

pseudosavant

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.

cpursley

I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.

simonw

(This is more of a tweet than a blog post, it really wasn't written with Hacker News in mind.)

dvrp

And wait till you find out about @oai/walnut

alex-moon

Someone may need to explain to me what is wrong with this sorry. Is it because it bloats the app with functionality that some users will never use? I feel like that is fairly usual for productivity/business apps generally.

lgl

Does that really mean that it's bundling those apps from the start or did it just download and install them at some point to do some local work on some prompt or job you ask it to? 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?

quotemstr

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

trentor

I don't see the problem?

jrflo

I've noticed that when I have codex read/modify word files the live reasoning snippets often allude to LibreOffice, so that makes sense. I think it was a quick and dirty way for them to interface with docx and xlsx files?

esperent

I actually bundle LibreOffice with my app too and the reason is reading files, especially old xls files. Since I'm bundling it I'm now using it for everything docs related but the specific reason is those old files. I couldn't find anything else that I could just drop it and feel confident it'll just read anything I give it.

vb-8448

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

m3kw9

probably uses it extensively to convert between LLM working on a doc and exporting it out to excel, word etc

dvduval

My agent did it? I didn’t do it.

mirzap

I wonder why they didn't try to discover if the user already has those binaries and use them before downloading.

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

zitterbewegung

It might be for their new Work product which can produce docx, pdf and pox files.

petilon

There is a serious threat to Microsoft here, if everyone starts using AI for generating and updating Office docs. At some point Office will become just a viewer.

isityettime

The new app is an unbelievable mess. Settings are senselessly organized, too. The whole thing has this aesthetic slickness and then underneath it's like the people who make it have never even used it. 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.

lennart-rth

I suspect that it’s used in headless clip mode to reliably convert file formats back and forth.

topaztee

spinning up an entire copy of libreoffice sounds super heavy?, if someone here is actually using chatgpt to edit docx documents then they can feel free to use us. vespper.com