It seems to have been introduced at the following commit: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=f3d96e6a3510b38b8c432b8d195d7aa2d2c0dc11 http:

It seems to have been introduced at the following commit: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=f3d96e6a3510b38b8c432b8d195d7aa2d2c0dc11 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=f3d9... I think even MSVC2008 should accept free(NULL) without crashing. My guess is that this was a case of tweaking the source code until the buggy compiler accepted it (it's within a "#ifdef _MSC_VER" block, so it's a MSVC-only workaround). He probably originally wrote the function containing something like std::abort(), but the compiler rejected it. So he changed it to a dummy (do-nothing) call to free(), and missed updating the comment he had written in the previous attempt.