I disagree with take on Wikipedia or Wikimedia there was a lot of trash talk because they were totally obnoxious with their fundraising.
I donated once to Wikipedia and then I was getting Jimmy Wales in my mailbox basically like everyday.
That actually drove me away from ever wanting to donate to them. Then there was a lot of talking if they really are so much in need of money but that's different topic.
In contrast I donated to LibreOffice and it was perfectly quiet for one time donation and I am happy to donate from time to time as I use LibreOffice for my personal stuff.
I have this same feeling with donating blood (in most EU countries you don't get paid for this so it is completely charitable).
If you have donated blood, every 2-3 months they will send you an e-mail for a new donation cycle. That's fine. But if you don't respond, they will send another reminder. Then a text. Then they will call you.
Yes, you can just click the "Not this time" button, and click the reason for denying in their web portal, but sometimes you're busy.
I understand that this procedure probably nets them more donations, but the feeling of being lightly hounded never escapes me, and it makes me slightly less agreeable about donating, even if it would never be a reason for me to not donate.
I donated blood for 25 years in Italy (I can’t anymore due to health reasons). Here we have a semi-public organization (AVIS - Italian Blood Volunteers Association) that handles donation and distribution. Zero stress, no “pushy” reminders, everything is completely voluntary. The trick is that by donating blood you receive your blood test results (a very comprehensive panel). It’s a mutually beneficial “do ut des” arrangement that is highly appreciated (and it helped me detect a serious issue at an early stage).
In addition, AVIS is a very community-oriented volunteer association that builds a sense of belonging and awareness.
We had the same system (Sanquin), they even have donation trucks that make the rounds through areas that don't have a donation clinic nearby. And they do give you a minor blood screening, and you get some good snacks after donating. But alas, they are also quite pushy with reminders :+)
One of my favourite criticisms, yes their procedure works, but it probably doesn't measure rejection rates. "We hounded these 1000 people for a donation, 60% responded favourably". Okay, but out of the 40% that didn't respond how many are you never going to see again? Who were those 40%?
My wife works in a line of business where up-selling is a debated issue. Most of the industry thinks it's good, because they see more sales on the products that are being pushed, but they never measure how many people are actively turned off by the aggressive sales tactics and won't return in the future and now buys absolutely nothing.
It's baffling to me that organisations never measure negative impact from campaigns, because maybe you're pushing away the wrong people. E.g. maybe your most reliable patrons are the most adverse to your campaign and now you have to work even hard to reach your goals next time, as these people are not coming back?
If that gets them more donations overall, don't they have a moral imperative to do it? Are people's lives worth less than some people getting annoyed by email nags?
Ugh. The persistent nagging fundraising drives are probably the main reason I haven’t donated to Wikipedia even though I feel like I should.
One time I donated to a Red Cross appeal and over the next decade I’m certain they spent more than my original donation on spamming me with physical junk mail trying to extract more money from me. Never again.
Same with political donations in the US. I gave to one campaign 10 years ago and I've been getting consistent requests for donations since. So now they all get marked as spam.
The first one came right after my donation.
I guess it works for them but it's crazy to me that all these orgs basically make you regret ever donating in the first place.
Ironically, though, I've donated to Wikipedia and they've never bothered me more.
Edit: I'm not implying they wouldn't bother you, though! I have no idea.
Political donation spam is a plague. I ran a donation website in 2018 and 2020 that split up money among many candidates, and by far the biggest complaint was the flood of email that came after using my site. In 2018 there wasn't even an opt-out button on ActBlue. In 2020 they added one, but the default was still to share your info. But it doesn't even really matter, because campaigns continue to buy and sell donor lists, so once you're in the system, you'll never get out.
It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.
But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.
There is some movement to try to fix this.
Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.
I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.
I had the same thing happen with donating blood. I donated blood and ever since then they call me once every week or two to nag me to donate more blood. I will never donate blood to that organization again.
Of course, recurring payments work completely differently. A shockingly large fraction of recurring payments are from people who never got around to cancelling it. They're already getting what they want, any email just risks disturbing this situation.
I still get yearly email summary of my donations. They don't need to send more, and they could not send it if their objective is to stay under the radar
Why not just click the “unsubscribe” button on any of those emails you complained about getting? Seems like blaming marketing for a lack of self-agency to opt-out, but I suppose we each have our own metrics. I’ve donated, got emails, clicked one button, stopped getting emails. Guess it just seems the complaint is very solvable, but I do partially understand your point.
> Why not just click the “unsubscribe” button on any of those emails you complained about getting
Because I work in software and I've known plenty of people in this industry that treat the unsubscribe button as a "there's a real user getting these emails" button
I really appreciate their comment describing their overreaction on a post about people overreacting when asked for donations. Goes a long way to prove TFA's point
I tend to mark them as spam (and hope that it causes them problems send email) if I didn't explicitly sign up for them. I'm not going to be polite about it if they aren't.
How do people notice that? I'm sometimes reading about that here, but in reality I never ran into an issue where I couldn't find anything any more or that I often re-visit the same article and would notice changes.
What drove me away from ever donating to Wikipedia again was that they asked me to put them in my will. For when I die. Absolutely disgusting. It reminds me of that one character from Glengarry Glen Ross.
Why is that disgusting? That's an extremely common revenue stream for charities. I know some charities where the majority of their income is derived from wills.
Consider the situation where someone who’s geriatric and potentially losing their mental faculties is getting hit with messages like that. Catch them at the wrong moment and they could well change their will, despite it not being what they would have wanted.
While the donation banner doesn't seem like an issue to me, the WMF comparison is extremely inappropriate if they want to talk about appropriate means of fundraising.
The WMF is notorious for its donation banners making wildly exaggerated claims about the state of the Foundation (it needs some money to be operational, it is however not by any real stretch of the imagination in financial trouble or losing its independence because it doesn't get enough money; they have a massive endowment that can run Wikipedia for the next 50 years or so, and major corporations already give money to the WMF to keep it in the air, making the statements those donation messages give to regular readers very deceptive), scaring people in third world countries into parting with their meager savings because they are scared of the WMF vanishing through deceptive language and in general their donation drives are extremely intrusive to the respective Wikipedias.
I understand that the Document Foundation just wants to bring donations to the attention of their users, but the WMF is the worst point to compare it to.
If anything I think the WMF approach is why people are upset with the LibreOffice banner.
They have been breeding bad will and it is overflowing onto others.
That said, the failure of this post to recognise the problem of the WMF approach does not build confidence in the ability to recognise when users might have a legitimate complaint. That leads them to wonder where LibreOffice is headed.
I am already donating the rough equivalent of the cheapest Microsoft 365 subscription to The Document Foundation each year, and won't stop now just because they're increasing the visibility of their donation-based funding model. I hope they succeed, and many more people start contributing financially as a result.
I don’t like donation banners. I don’t like more that they’re necessary and actually work.
A small problem is they degrade the software even when I’ve already donated. The bigger problem is they’re a downward spiral: people get desensitized, so you have to add more aggressive banners, until you’re like the 33MB news sites where 90% of the screen is intrusive noise. Our society, offline and online, is already crammed with ugly boards asking us to give money.
There are ad-free spaces, and it’s at least theoretically possible to make money without ads yourself. I hope eventually ads will become less effective and people will become more inclined to donate (or something like UBI), so it will be more possible.
Until then, I don’t really fault LibreOffice for this. Especially because it’s FOSS, so people who really care can just remove it.
I'm not sure people get desensitized. Personally, whenever I notice a really unintrusive donation banner, I have more chance to actually give money to this entity, because I've been shown so much crap all over, so I can respect someone who places a gentle nudge at the bottom of a screen I'll look at for a whole 5 seconds. I'm not sure how it degrades the experience, too.
Also, you might want to read the article. LibreOffice specifically points out the banner was moved, and not added or removed.
I've noticed a very sudden uptick in users of FOSS software being so low trust that they will see a small change, assume it's much larger, and then retreat to some rationalization that it's still bad when shown it's pretty small (slippery slope / boiling frog type arguments). I'm not too familiar with this story in particular but I have been following the Systemd birthdate field controversy, and it's exhausting. I don't even think of myself as that high trust compared to the people taking issue, but it's like they're in a completely different world. Is this actually a trend (in specific, not the general loss of institutional trust) or am I only now paying attention?
Well, we can certainly disagree about the harms (fingerprinting) and slippery slopeness (AV started for porn, but we all knew it wasn't going to stop there)
But to get to the meat of your question, trust is lost through betrayal. Organizations have been deciding unpopular policies without consulting their users, or having meaningful methods for users to opt out or push back. For a long time, users assumed open source would be the last bastion of privacy and user freedom, and then were shocked when those values were not actually shared by maintainers.
The paternalistic perspective that the organization knows users hate something but push it anyway is always going to lose trust. That practice needs to stop, and instead consider how open source can treat the user base as important stakeholders.
The problem is for over a decade companies keep doing enshittification tactics and it’s destroyed trust.
Plus there’s been a lot of public to private migrations like minio and others that feel like total rug pulls.
I am with you that the birthday field is blown way out of proportion, but I’m also positive that once that’s enforced governments will use this to restrict whatever they don’t like arbitrarily (see LGBTQ book bans).
Trust in open source devs is definitely down. There was that book lore app drama just a couple weeks ago because the dev used AI, and the community didn’t like AI (which escalated poorly).
Nobody really cared how the open source sausage was made, but now it’s the most important thing to people.
I understand that dealing with complaints is annoying, but the response in the article was very unprofessional. Feel free to say what the change is, why it is there, and perhaps even address some of the concerns. But attacking users, even if it is a small segment of the population, does not paint The Document Foundation in a positive light.
Entitlement and, really, some of this crosses the line into bullying of the foundation and the maintainers, should be dealt with robustly. It will help to reset expectations around what's reasonable for the relationship of those developing LibreOffice with the community of users.
People need to recognise that they get a huge amount of value out of LibreOffice, for which they aren't required to pay a penny, so it's not unreasonable to be asked if they would like to contribute something back in return.
But amongst large populations of people, when it comees to free things, some portion of that population will always undervalue that free thing and fail to recognise how much benefit they get from it and start acting entitled. There's nothing wrong with calling that out.
> It doesn't look professional when you loose your temper, this article is comparable to that.
Nobody's lost their temper. In no world does the article read like anyone has. That's you applying your own interpretive lens to the text, not what the text actually says.
(But actually, alienating the troublesome portions of their userbase might actually help them and the LibreOffice community over the longer term. C.f., firing customers.)
> Media coverage has largely omitted the fact that LibreOffice has been displaying donation requests for years.
Bringing thunderbird under the bus
> Nobody is making the comparison with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has asked its users for donations practically every time it starts up, with clearly visible banners
And then Wikipedia
> The same logic applies to Wikipedia.
Answering to 'comments'
> Some comments have even suggested
C'mon don't tell me it's professional, it looks amateurish.
First rule: you don't give out names.
Second rule: You don't push the fault on other even when it's their.
Third rule: you don't answer to 'comments', 'tweets', and so on. You say 'we heard feedback that this and this'.
I say it again, it feels like it's been written by a guy alone, no supervision whatsoever, and who didn't have the The necessary step back.
Making a statement of fact about media coverage isn't "bashing". And when you start off your argument by characterising it that way you've already lost.
Absurd take. The response was completely measured, and even if it wasn't The Document Foundation has no obligation either legal or moral to present as professional. They are not a business.
It's one thing for you to put a banner up on your web page, which I will see when I visit you. I can just choose not to visit, if I don't want to see your message.
It's another thing for you to put a banner inside my computer, on the software I use to manage my own data: that ought to be a tool I use for my own purposes, and not a place for you to do what you want.
A tool which starts acting as an agent for its developers, not as an agent for me, is not a tool I want to continue using.
How are you supposed to make an informed decision to simply not use libreoffice when they pop something like this on people unannounced, undisclosed, without precedent?
If I create software I can do whatever the heck I want and that includes displaying a billion banners. And you got the right to not use my software.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also consider trusting them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive, in which case you might wanna give them a hint (e.g. by detailing how you would imagine it would work instead in terms of finances).
If I create software I can do whatever the heck I want and that includes displaying a billion banners. And you got the right to not use my software.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also want trust them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive you run regularly.
I donated - it's valuable software and I love it very much. My feeling is as long as it's not hounding me for future payments i.e. calling me up during the day, it's fine.
Well, that is the thing, people complain and then everyone is sad why projects die or get taken over by corporations, because there are bills to pay, and not everyone can live from charity.
> a non-intrusive banner that appears monthly on a transition screen and asks users who save hundreds of euros or dollars a year to consider making a voluntary contribution is not scandalous
Showing that actually pretty intrusive banner would undermine their argument.
Okay cool, I don't ask for donations. Instead I just sell my product, something like a Office 2024 license. 120 Eur a year, but feel free to use it as long as you like. That's what I bought recently. I don't want Microsoft 365 with the cloud storage, I pay Dropbox for that and use some other client to use it basically as a extra storage device for backups. I just need an Office suite, Excel, Word, Powerpoint. Yes: LibreOffice is nice and all, but doesn't work for MY needs.
But I get your point: having a succesful Open Source (FLOSS) app without dono's isn't possible, you need to have some to make it work anyhow.
This is a bad argument. Established things are established. “If you don’t like what the president of your country is doing, just run for the office yourself.”
"Established things are established" BUT "established things don't always stay there." Things can change, if many people will support said change. The power of many is really something.
Exactly. And it seems that "many people" do not, in fact, support this change, to the point Libreoffice felt necessary to defend it after the fact on their official website.
Maybe "many people" remember what's been going on at Mozilla over the past decade. After all, Mozilla went there before and set the example of downward slope: first donations then partnerships, first opt-in then opt-out then automatically installed addons, first "contribute to the browser" then to sideprojects/non-technical causes, etc.
I am not sure the author realizes that Wikimedia fundraising is indeed controversial, given that we know how much money they already have. Same applies to Mozilla. But maybe they have their own bubble and are focused on negative reactions to recent announcements?
If you ever try to write a email client, you will immediately realize how difficult, if not impossible, to fix all the bugs for a email client. It is a multi-different-protocol-version-async-client-handling-same-database-with-thousands-of-race-condition backwards compatibility nightmare.
Writing a email client with support of just up-to-date protocols and assume it is the single client that will operate that account is trivial, write one that covers all corner cases is a totally different story.
I don't know about the rest, but surely the race conditions are the fault of whoever designed the concurrency part. An email client does not inherently have race conditions.
OK? Sure would be nice to hear why having a second email client talk to the remote server introduces race conditions on the local client (EDIT: that is, race conditions that are the local client's responsibility).
Adding a mobile version, MS Exchange integration, supporting OAuth2 login, refreshing the UI periodically because otherwise everyone whines about how "dated" it looks.
Just yesterday I used Jellyfin2Samsung to install Moonlight on my TV. After the installation, the app shown a popup to donate to the author ("buy me a beer"). And I figured why not? The software turned a tedious process into a one-click solution, letting me do what I wanted to do (stream games to my TV) rather than spending an evening messing with Tizen Studio. Absolutely worth a few dollars.
KDE's Plasma will popup a notification every once in a while asking for donation. When you close it, you won't hear from it again until the next fundraiser. I almost always donate as well.
If a software asks in a non-obtrusive way, ideally after I used it (either for a while or like in case of Jellyfin2Samsung after doing the one thing it's supposed to do), I don't mind at all.
I dislike apps (mostly websites) that keep asking for money, regardless of whether you already donated or not every single time you visit them.
Came here for this. In one of Nathan's blog posts he describes the notification as noticably driving the donations. Personally I haven't seen it ever myself, and what I also haven't seen is any complaints about it.
Would have been a better comparison than Wikimedia I guess, but aside that, the LibreOffice team still has a valid point that the reactions are unjustified.
In a week nobody will talk about it anymore though, so LO team, just sit it through :)
I was going to say that this kind of post is pointless, because the kinds of people who complain about a donation banner are impossible to convince that they are wrong in doing so, but I see that people are donating, so at least it accomplished one good thing.
I increasingly find that donations should be the way open source projects should be financed. Showing banner ads in end-user facing software asking for donations towards the development of that same software seems like the perfect way to get attention for it.
This seems like an improvement. The beg banner sometimes appears above a document I am editing. This change will move it to the Start Center, which I never use. Who does? I just launch the LibreOffice app I want to use.
Why can't governments fund LibreOffice as part of their effort to wean themselves away from Microsoft? This seems like such an obvious thing for governments to fund for their own use and bequeath as a gift to their citizenry.
1. A lot of people aren't even aware of the alternatives;
2. There is a lot of backlash from people afraid to learn new things;
3. Even in IT departments, people who are used to administering MS networks will fight against it;
4. Does LibreOffice have a marketing department?
I wholeheartedly agree that governments should not only use Linux/LibreOffice in their bureaucracies, but that they should also finance and promote it, especially in peripheral economies.
I think OP's point is that certain government agencies have already transitioned or are in the process of transitioning.
As such it would make sense for them to fund LibreOffice, given that they now depend on it.
Anyway, most people don’t want to interact with office type documents, right? The only reason I have it installed is to deal with a problem usually generated by some big organization: documents that aren’t available in an accessible format like Tex, markdown, or html. Let the people generating the problem pay for it.
I'm all for this. Unobtrusive and just enough to put it in folks mind. I'm not a big fan of the Author though.
How come there's no photos of the before/after? That would be much more useful than the condescension. They treat the reader like they've already whined with the least reasonable complaint. But they don't even bother to make their case properly, just point fingers at who else has done it, as if that's reason enough.
Wikipedia is NOT a good comparison. Their banners are obtrusive, obnoxious and the reason I stopped my $1/mo donation more than a decade ago. Well more specifically the begging/crying prompted me to look into their finances and spending and it turns out they were pretty irresponsible at least then. Lots of highly paid "administrators," software devs working on poorly thought out systems. Lots of interfering with volunteer contributions.
26.2 has a Donate button on the bottom left of the window alongside showing recent documents and the opening and various sub application launchers. I rarely go to the generic Libre Office screen since I mostly launch documents or the individual applications so I hadn't really noticed it but currently its small.
The demand of users is infinite, even if they don't pay, in fact the less they pay the more demanding they may be.
You know when users gang up on Freemium companies that monetize with ads? Acting like ads are the evil of the world, it's just because they want free stuff and don't want to 'pay' with ads.
This is an even more extreme example, they want free stuff and they become entitled to it, it's very common in Open Source, there's this very famous GitHub issue that goes something like "I don't want source code, give me an executable don't bother me with linux stuff..."
User demands are infinite, the more you provide, the more they will complain to you, because you are the ones that solve issues.
If you see it that way, I think that you shouldn't be involved in any open source project and instead let others do it.
There are plenty of people that want to contribute in a open source project not because of the users but simply for their own need or because they believe in the project.
Remember this thread and this "controversy" next time some open source project talks about funding and people asking "Why don't you put up a donation button!" or "I didn't know it was this bad" or "they need to ask for money before it gets bad!"
Many of the threads here are shameful and ignorant.
I agree with them, nothing wrong to ask for a donation to keep the lights on. At the same time, it needs to be possible to disable this banner for enterprise deployments
It's open source so I'm sure there is a way. But maybe then the enterprise deployments can't depend on the freely provided binaries and hosting associated, and will have to build the project themselves and handle distribution.
If there's anybody who should pay for their software, it's enterprise. They should be able to disable the banner by paying a fair price for their office suite.
You have to take a correction for the fact that some FOSS enjoyers are on the spectrum and - like an African grey parrot - can freak out to however inconsequential changes in their environment.
I honestly forgot there was even a "base" UI to open documents from, i use libreoffice largely for spreadsheets and just open the spreadsheet program directly XD
> Moving the request to the Start Centre is not an escalation, but a change in location and frequency.
I support LibreOffice and what they're trying to do here, but this statement that it's not an "escalation" out of one side of their mouth and then admitting it's a "change in location and frequency" out of the other tells me that they are being disingenuous about it. An unobtrusive notice on where to donate seems like a reasonable direction, but if they don't view this obvious escalation as such, then what else will they do that they don't view as an escalation?
I don't understand this immediate reaction. What is it with people getting bitchy the moment a project starts asking for donations? Are people really that greedy that they would want something to be free forever? I mean sure, a corporation like MS might rug-pull like this (the freemium model or worse), but come on, guys, this is the Document Foundation that we're talking about. Unless I missed something massive, they have never once done anything like this, and it would be really, really weird for them to suddenly start doing this now. And they aren't the only OSS projects asking for donations, either. Are we going to crucify everyone who wants donations now?
I wonder how many of the complaints are “real” and how many are propaganda.
LibreOffice has been an alternative to MS Office for a very long time. Including when Office was quite expensive at its cheapest. I can imagine there has been plenty of anti-libreOffice seeds planted in that time that are still bearing fruit.
Donation and tip fatigue. Can't go anywhere without being bombarded with beggars. FOSS used to not have this, people got that you were supposed to have a real job to support yourself, not cultivate a discord club of beta orbiter patreon paypigs, as is the modern style.
This... Is a really weird take. Really. Maybe, just maybe, people want to dedicate full time to OSS? Maybe they can't find a job? A donation is just that, donations. Quite different, I think, from a tip, in that there is no cultural pressure to donate as there is for tips. If you don't want to donate, don't. But don't complain when people kindly ask for them. (Also, a tip (especially online ones) is very different because, unlike a tip, you actually know the donation is going towards the entity your donating too, instead of you not knowing if the tip is going to the person it should be going to or if it's going to the company operating the service.)
Off-topic, but I think this AI-generated post (probably just modified for clarity/language rather than full slop) could have used an additional prompt to dial down the combativeness ("overreacting") and reduce text length by 2x without losing any useful detail.
a very significant reason for useing linux is to avoid any and all distraction.
Popups are a deal breaker, and a very very clear indication of the transition into just another part of the advertainment industrial complex.
you need money?, then help us become successful enough to pay the debt we feel.
Not related to donations but product wise Libreoffice just feels so clunky and Java-ish to use. I switched to OnlyOffice a year ago and other than its almost complete lack of settings it's been so much nicer to use.
Yeah I'm aware it sort of is (technically it's Latvian and there's a Russian holding company that owns that I think?) but at least it is open source and can be run locally and offline without any network connection (I have things blocked by default with LittleSnitch as well) https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai.... Russian software is pretty obviously more likely than most other countries to have security / privacy concerns doesn't inherently mean that it all does, American software presents a lot of privacy concerns internationally as well (not that I am by any means calling them equivalents!).
Yep, calling your users entitled and telling them they're overreacting instead of listening to them. That surely isn't going to backfire. It never did.
They lost me at putting "overreacting" in the title.
If that's the way they react to negative user feedback, they deserve more of it. Even Microsoft sometimes caves in if enough people complain - recall is now optional and I believe opt-in; there's noises about maybe not sticking AI in everything and letting you turn it off in future versions.
This is just belligerence and hostility cloaked in concern. This isn't a for-peofit enterprise that will regress back to Internet Explorer toolbar hell if we don't keep reminding them that we don't like it. This is a community-led effort, which you trust enough to run on your desktop, but apparently don't trust enough to not go wild with donation banners. What level of trust is that? Trust only as long as it benefits you?
Trust and user experience are two different things.
I would trust them not to spy on me and not to gather data for behavioural advertising whether they had no banner, a banner, or an autoplaying video every time you start Docs. I just wouldn't be equally happy with the product in each of those cases.
What bothers me is not the banner itself but their reaction to it.
Someone who handled this better recently: Mozilla got user feedback on their AI integration, and added an off switch.
> What bothers me is not the banner itself but their reaction to it.
What about the reaction to the banner? Do you care that people are being hostile to a project over a banner, or do you reserve your tone policing for projects responding to hostility?
I don't mind that part, but I do mind resentment based reflexes completely detached from any analysis of any particular wrong.
It's perfectly fair game to call it overreactions, and even in this thread, no one seems to be disputing that that's what they are, the main concern is the analogy to Wiki's fundraising practices is an example of normal.
Life as an open source developer is often nasty, brutal, and in some cases short if they get pushed out of the game by hostile users who make it feel like a thankless task. They've been trying to sound the alarm on this, and I for one want to be part of what makes these developers thankful for the communities they have rather than frustrated.
I know sometimes I suffer from "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome, and I try and proactively balance out that part of my personality with lots of upvotes on good things (like the people in this thread noting that they donate to the project), and by being supportive of developers and people sharing their hobby projects.
The issue here isn’t that we’re asking for donations. The massive banner is significantly impairing usability. It’s wrong to ask for donations at the expense of usability.
To me, the start page is mostly just a giant "open" dialog, with huge buttons and not much functionality to it, there is more than enough space for a fundraiser.
I don't even use it that much. When I want to open a file, I click on it in the file manager. When I want to create a new file, I launch the appropriate program (ex: LibreOffice Writer), which defaults to a blank document.
The telling part about uselessness of that window is that the most visible difference between StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0 was that equivalent of this window was removed. It got reintroduced probably because it makes packaging LibreOffice for macOS easier.
While it may not be essential for experienced users, I think it is very important for beginners.
Imagine you know nothing about LibreOffice, except that it is an office suite. You download the thing, install it and now what? Most people expect to have something called "LibreOffice" that can be launched and does something sensible. That's what the start page is for.
It is also the reason why it is a good spot for a fundraiser. It tells new users that LibreOffice takes donations, but it will not get in the way of experienced users who already know how LibreOffice work as they are likely to skip the start page entirely.
I disagree with take on Wikipedia or Wikimedia there was a lot of trash talk because they were totally obnoxious with their fundraising.
I donated once to Wikipedia and then I was getting Jimmy Wales in my mailbox basically like everyday.
That actually drove me away from ever wanting to donate to them. Then there was a lot of talking if they really are so much in need of money but that's different topic.
In contrast I donated to LibreOffice and it was perfectly quiet for one time donation and I am happy to donate from time to time as I use LibreOffice for my personal stuff.
I have this same feeling with donating blood (in most EU countries you don't get paid for this so it is completely charitable).
If you have donated blood, every 2-3 months they will send you an e-mail for a new donation cycle. That's fine. But if you don't respond, they will send another reminder. Then a text. Then they will call you.
Yes, you can just click the "Not this time" button, and click the reason for denying in their web portal, but sometimes you're busy.
I understand that this procedure probably nets them more donations, but the feeling of being lightly hounded never escapes me, and it makes me slightly less agreeable about donating, even if it would never be a reason for me to not donate.
I donated blood for 25 years in Italy (I can’t anymore due to health reasons). Here we have a semi-public organization (AVIS - Italian Blood Volunteers Association) that handles donation and distribution. Zero stress, no “pushy” reminders, everything is completely voluntary. The trick is that by donating blood you receive your blood test results (a very comprehensive panel). It’s a mutually beneficial “do ut des” arrangement that is highly appreciated (and it helped me detect a serious issue at an early stage).
In addition, AVIS is a very community-oriented volunteer association that builds a sense of belonging and awareness.
Organized this way, the system works.
We had the same system (Sanquin), they even have donation trucks that make the rounds through areas that don't have a donation clinic nearby. And they do give you a minor blood screening, and you get some good snacks after donating. But alas, they are also quite pushy with reminders :+)
One of my favourite criticisms, yes their procedure works, but it probably doesn't measure rejection rates. "We hounded these 1000 people for a donation, 60% responded favourably". Okay, but out of the 40% that didn't respond how many are you never going to see again? Who were those 40%?
My wife works in a line of business where up-selling is a debated issue. Most of the industry thinks it's good, because they see more sales on the products that are being pushed, but they never measure how many people are actively turned off by the aggressive sales tactics and won't return in the future and now buys absolutely nothing.
It's baffling to me that organisations never measure negative impact from campaigns, because maybe you're pushing away the wrong people. E.g. maybe your most reliable patrons are the most adverse to your campaign and now you have to work even hard to reach your goals next time, as these people are not coming back?
I still remember giving the SF Symphony money and being aggressively hounded for two years and them repeatedly failing to remove me from their lists.
I love the Symphony and support their mission but it is hard for me to imagine ever giving them a donation again. It seems like it's inviting ruin.
I always donate anonymously when I can because the deluge of “old people spam” is never worth it.
I like to call that dark number the "conversion aversion".
If that gets them more donations overall, don't they have a moral imperative to do it? Are people's lives worth less than some people getting annoyed by email nags?
Nobody likes the feeling of being hunted.
You can disable probably that nagging. I did. (in France)
Yeah, having Jimbo staring creepily in my face made me never want to donate to Wikipedia ever.
Ugh. The persistent nagging fundraising drives are probably the main reason I haven’t donated to Wikipedia even though I feel like I should.
One time I donated to a Red Cross appeal and over the next decade I’m certain they spent more than my original donation on spamming me with physical junk mail trying to extract more money from me. Never again.
Same with political donations in the US. I gave to one campaign 10 years ago and I've been getting consistent requests for donations since. So now they all get marked as spam.
The first one came right after my donation.
I guess it works for them but it's crazy to me that all these orgs basically make you regret ever donating in the first place.
Ironically, though, I've donated to Wikipedia and they've never bothered me more.
Edit: I'm not implying they wouldn't bother you, though! I have no idea.
Political donation spam is a plague. I ran a donation website in 2018 and 2020 that split up money among many candidates, and by far the biggest complaint was the flood of email that came after using my site. In 2018 there wasn't even an opt-out button on ActBlue. In 2020 they added one, but the default was still to share your info. But it doesn't even really matter, because campaigns continue to buy and sell donor lists, so once you're in the system, you'll never get out.
It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.
But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.
There is some movement to try to fix this.
Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.
I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.
This is a great response. Thank you. :)
I'll check out oath.vote (maybe).
I had the same thing happen with donating blood. I donated blood and ever since then they call me once every week or two to nag me to donate more blood. I will never donate blood to that organization again.
The salaries are a big turnoff for me to donate again: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
I donated and don't receive any spam - you could perhaps try reviewing mail list settings / unsubcribe.
I donate to Wikipedia on a recurring, monthly basis and don’t get any of this.
Of course, recurring payments work completely differently. A shockingly large fraction of recurring payments are from people who never got around to cancelling it. They're already getting what they want, any email just risks disturbing this situation.
I still get yearly email summary of my donations. They don't need to send more, and they could not send it if their objective is to stay under the radar
That could be true. I guess I could try giving a one-time donation from another account and see what happens.
Why not just click the “unsubscribe” button on any of those emails you complained about getting? Seems like blaming marketing for a lack of self-agency to opt-out, but I suppose we each have our own metrics. I’ve donated, got emails, clicked one button, stopped getting emails. Guess it just seems the complaint is very solvable, but I do partially understand your point.
> Why not just click the “unsubscribe” button on any of those emails you complained about getting
Because I work in software and I've known plenty of people in this industry that treat the unsubscribe button as a "there's a real user getting these emails" button
I really appreciate their comment describing their overreaction on a post about people overreacting when asked for donations. Goes a long way to prove TFA's point
I tend to mark them as spam (and hope that it causes them problems send email) if I didn't explicitly sign up for them. I'm not going to be polite about it if they aren't.
The Deletionists drove me away from Wikipedia. Articles keep disappearing. It's a truly bizarre paradigm.
How do people notice that? I'm sometimes reading about that here, but in reality I never ran into an issue where I couldn't find anything any more or that I often re-visit the same article and would notice changes.
What drove me away from ever donating to Wikipedia again was that they asked me to put them in my will. For when I die. Absolutely disgusting. It reminds me of that one character from Glengarry Glen Ross.
Why is that disgusting? That's an extremely common revenue stream for charities. I know some charities where the majority of their income is derived from wills.
Consider the situation where someone who’s geriatric and potentially losing their mental faculties is getting hit with messages like that. Catch them at the wrong moment and they could well change their will, despite it not being what they would have wanted.
If the person is geriatric and losing their mind, there is much worse on the internet than a suggestion about their will when making a donation.
It's a jarring, off-putting email to receive after making your first ever online donation.
While the donation banner doesn't seem like an issue to me, the WMF comparison is extremely inappropriate if they want to talk about appropriate means of fundraising.
The WMF is notorious for its donation banners making wildly exaggerated claims about the state of the Foundation (it needs some money to be operational, it is however not by any real stretch of the imagination in financial trouble or losing its independence because it doesn't get enough money; they have a massive endowment that can run Wikipedia for the next 50 years or so, and major corporations already give money to the WMF to keep it in the air, making the statements those donation messages give to regular readers very deceptive), scaring people in third world countries into parting with their meager savings because they are scared of the WMF vanishing through deceptive language and in general their donation drives are extremely intrusive to the respective Wikipedias.
I understand that the Document Foundation just wants to bring donations to the attention of their users, but the WMF is the worst point to compare it to.
If anything I think the WMF approach is why people are upset with the LibreOffice banner.
They have been breeding bad will and it is overflowing onto others.
That said, the failure of this post to recognise the problem of the WMF approach does not build confidence in the ability to recognise when users might have a legitimate complaint. That leads them to wonder where LibreOffice is headed.
This comes up every year; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2025_ban... for instance.
I am already donating the rough equivalent of the cheapest Microsoft 365 subscription to The Document Foundation each year, and won't stop now just because they're increasing the visibility of their donation-based funding model. I hope they succeed, and many more people start contributing financially as a result.
Reminds me of the core-js debacle.
I don’t like donation banners. I don’t like more that they’re necessary and actually work.
A small problem is they degrade the software even when I’ve already donated. The bigger problem is they’re a downward spiral: people get desensitized, so you have to add more aggressive banners, until you’re like the 33MB news sites where 90% of the screen is intrusive noise. Our society, offline and online, is already crammed with ugly boards asking us to give money.
There are ad-free spaces, and it’s at least theoretically possible to make money without ads yourself. I hope eventually ads will become less effective and people will become more inclined to donate (or something like UBI), so it will be more possible.
Until then, I don’t really fault LibreOffice for this. Especially because it’s FOSS, so people who really care can just remove it.
I'm not sure people get desensitized. Personally, whenever I notice a really unintrusive donation banner, I have more chance to actually give money to this entity, because I've been shown so much crap all over, so I can respect someone who places a gentle nudge at the bottom of a screen I'll look at for a whole 5 seconds. I'm not sure how it degrades the experience, too.
Also, you might want to read the article. LibreOffice specifically points out the banner was moved, and not added or removed.
I've noticed a very sudden uptick in users of FOSS software being so low trust that they will see a small change, assume it's much larger, and then retreat to some rationalization that it's still bad when shown it's pretty small (slippery slope / boiling frog type arguments). I'm not too familiar with this story in particular but I have been following the Systemd birthdate field controversy, and it's exhausting. I don't even think of myself as that high trust compared to the people taking issue, but it's like they're in a completely different world. Is this actually a trend (in specific, not the general loss of institutional trust) or am I only now paying attention?
Well, we can certainly disagree about the harms (fingerprinting) and slippery slopeness (AV started for porn, but we all knew it wasn't going to stop there)
But to get to the meat of your question, trust is lost through betrayal. Organizations have been deciding unpopular policies without consulting their users, or having meaningful methods for users to opt out or push back. For a long time, users assumed open source would be the last bastion of privacy and user freedom, and then were shocked when those values were not actually shared by maintainers.
The paternalistic perspective that the organization knows users hate something but push it anyway is always going to lose trust. That practice needs to stop, and instead consider how open source can treat the user base as important stakeholders.
The problem is for over a decade companies keep doing enshittification tactics and it’s destroyed trust.
Plus there’s been a lot of public to private migrations like minio and others that feel like total rug pulls.
I am with you that the birthday field is blown way out of proportion, but I’m also positive that once that’s enforced governments will use this to restrict whatever they don’t like arbitrarily (see LGBTQ book bans).
Trust in open source devs is definitely down. There was that book lore app drama just a couple weeks ago because the dev used AI, and the community didn’t like AI (which escalated poorly).
Nobody really cared how the open source sausage was made, but now it’s the most important thing to people.
I understand that dealing with complaints is annoying, but the response in the article was very unprofessional. Feel free to say what the change is, why it is there, and perhaps even address some of the concerns. But attacking users, even if it is a small segment of the population, does not paint The Document Foundation in a positive light.
The response is fine.
Entitlement and, really, some of this crosses the line into bullying of the foundation and the maintainers, should be dealt with robustly. It will help to reset expectations around what's reasonable for the relationship of those developing LibreOffice with the community of users.
People need to recognise that they get a huge amount of value out of LibreOffice, for which they aren't required to pay a penny, so it's not unreasonable to be asked if they would like to contribute something back in return.
But amongst large populations of people, when it comees to free things, some portion of that population will always undervalue that free thing and fail to recognise how much benefit they get from it and start acting entitled. There's nothing wrong with calling that out.
It doesn't look professional when you loose your temper, this article is comparable to that.
When reading it, I kept thinking that the writer was too emotionally involved.
> It doesn't look professional when you loose your temper, this article is comparable to that.
Nobody's lost their temper. In no world does the article read like anyone has. That's you applying your own interpretive lens to the text, not what the text actually says.
(But actually, alienating the troublesome portions of their userbase might actually help them and the LibreOffice community over the longer term. C.f., firing customers.)
Bashing media for having done their job badly
> Media coverage has largely omitted the fact that LibreOffice has been displaying donation requests for years.
Bringing thunderbird under the bus
> Nobody is making the comparison with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has asked its users for donations practically every time it starts up, with clearly visible banners
And then Wikipedia
> The same logic applies to Wikipedia.
Answering to 'comments'
> Some comments have even suggested
C'mon don't tell me it's professional, it looks amateurish.
First rule: you don't give out names.
Second rule: You don't push the fault on other even when it's their.
Third rule: you don't answer to 'comments', 'tweets', and so on. You say 'we heard feedback that this and this'.
I say it again, it feels like it's been written by a guy alone, no supervision whatsoever, and who didn't have the The necessary step back.
> Bashing media for having done their job badly
Making a statement of fact about media coverage isn't "bashing". And when you start off your argument by characterising it that way you've already lost.
The article is professional.
I agree, what's the alternative, not only are they not allowed to ask for Donations, but now they are not allowed to complain about entitlement?
How ridiculous would that be, users that get stuff for free setting the rules on how they should receive the free stuff.
Absurd take. The response was completely measured, and even if it wasn't The Document Foundation has no obligation either legal or moral to present as professional. They are not a business.
Just made a donation. LibreOffice is not going in the direction I would like to, but this software is bringing so much to the community.
Interesting how this turned out for the better.
Italo Vitrioli’s personal grievances shouldn’t be posted on the official TDF blog!
It's one thing for you to put a banner up on your web page, which I will see when I visit you. I can just choose not to visit, if I don't want to see your message.
It's another thing for you to put a banner inside my computer, on the software I use to manage my own data: that ought to be a tool I use for my own purposes, and not a place for you to do what you want.
A tool which starts acting as an agent for its developers, not as an agent for me, is not a tool I want to continue using.
The same way you can decide to not visit a website, you can decide to not use LibreOffice.
I think it makes sense, how else are they supposed to fundraise and develop the features that makes the software useful to manage your own data?
How are you supposed to make an informed decision to simply not use libreoffice when they pop something like this on people unannounced, undisclosed, without precedent?
If I create software I can do whatever the heck I want and that includes displaying a billion banners. And you got the right to not use my software.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also consider trusting them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive, in which case you might wanna give them a hint (e.g. by detailing how you would imagine it would work instead in terms of finances).
If I create software I can do whatever the heck I want and that includes displaying a billion banners. And you got the right to not use my software.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also want trust them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive you run regularly.
I donated - it's valuable software and I love it very much. My feeling is as long as it's not hounding me for future payments i.e. calling me up during the day, it's fine.
Well, that is the thing, people complain and then everyone is sad why projects die or get taken over by corporations, because there are bills to pay, and not everyone can live from charity.
seems like a missed opportunity not to include a screenshot of said banner in this blog post
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> a non-intrusive banner that appears monthly on a transition screen and asks users who save hundreds of euros or dollars a year to consider making a voluntary contribution is not scandalous
Showing that actually pretty intrusive banner would undermine their argument.
This prompted me to look it up.
Are we seriously talking about a white box with placeholder text, or has there been a development since then?
https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=libr...
How does LibreOffice save people hundreds?
By providing a free competent competitor to other Office software bundles.
Oh come on. If you can create a better program without ever asking for donations, feel free to do so.
Okay cool, I don't ask for donations. Instead I just sell my product, something like a Office 2024 license. 120 Eur a year, but feel free to use it as long as you like. That's what I bought recently. I don't want Microsoft 365 with the cloud storage, I pay Dropbox for that and use some other client to use it basically as a extra storage device for backups. I just need an Office suite, Excel, Word, Powerpoint. Yes: LibreOffice is nice and all, but doesn't work for MY needs.
But I get your point: having a succesful Open Source (FLOSS) app without dono's isn't possible, you need to have some to make it work anyhow.
This is a bad argument. Established things are established. “If you don’t like what the president of your country is doing, just run for the office yourself.”
"Established things are established" BUT "established things don't always stay there." Things can change, if many people will support said change. The power of many is really something.
Exactly. And it seems that "many people" do not, in fact, support this change, to the point Libreoffice felt necessary to defend it after the fact on their official website.
Maybe "many people" remember what's been going on at Mozilla over the past decade. After all, Mozilla went there before and set the example of downward slope: first donations then partnerships, first opt-in then opt-out then automatically installed addons, first "contribute to the browser" then to sideprojects/non-technical causes, etc.
A similar case could be made for Wikimedia.
I am not sure the author realizes that Wikimedia fundraising is indeed controversial, given that we know how much money they already have. Same applies to Mozilla. But maybe they have their own bubble and are focused on negative reactions to recent announcements?
Not Mozilla’s but Thunderbird’s appeals were seen as mostly positive (and independent of Mozilla).
> Same applies to Mozilla.
Not Thunderbird. It is just a poor abandoned child.
Mozilla, maybe.
What ongoing work does an email client need, though, besides fixing bugs and very occasionally adding new login protocols?
If you ever try to write a email client, you will immediately realize how difficult, if not impossible, to fix all the bugs for a email client. It is a multi-different-protocol-version-async-client-handling-same-database-with-thousands-of-race-condition backwards compatibility nightmare.
Writing a email client with support of just up-to-date protocols and assume it is the single client that will operate that account is trivial, write one that covers all corner cases is a totally different story.
I don't know about the rest, but surely the race conditions are the fault of whoever designed the concurrency part. An email client does not inherently have race conditions.
> assume it is the single client that will operate that account
You are still making wild assumption without actually thinking about what means to writing an email client.
OK? Sure would be nice to hear why having a second email client talk to the remote server introduces race conditions on the local client (EDIT: that is, race conditions that are the local client's responsibility).
Adding a mobile version, MS Exchange integration, supporting OAuth2 login, refreshing the UI periodically because otherwise everyone whines about how "dated" it looks.
Their RSS could use some improvements, but the same could be said about all of them.
Just yesterday I used Jellyfin2Samsung to install Moonlight on my TV. After the installation, the app shown a popup to donate to the author ("buy me a beer"). And I figured why not? The software turned a tedious process into a one-click solution, letting me do what I wanted to do (stream games to my TV) rather than spending an evening messing with Tizen Studio. Absolutely worth a few dollars.
KDE's Plasma will popup a notification every once in a while asking for donation. When you close it, you won't hear from it again until the next fundraiser. I almost always donate as well.
If a software asks in a non-obtrusive way, ideally after I used it (either for a while or like in case of Jellyfin2Samsung after doing the one thing it's supposed to do), I don't mind at all.
I dislike apps (mostly websites) that keep asking for money, regardless of whether you already donated or not every single time you visit them.
Came here for this. In one of Nathan's blog posts he describes the notification as noticably driving the donations. Personally I haven't seen it ever myself, and what I also haven't seen is any complaints about it.
Would have been a better comparison than Wikimedia I guess, but aside that, the LibreOffice team still has a valid point that the reactions are unjustified.
In a week nobody will talk about it anymore though, so LO team, just sit it through :)
I believe Jellyfin recently made it onto the tizen app store, fwiw.
Smells like shareware from the old days. Didn't mind it then, either.
I was going to say that this kind of post is pointless, because the kinds of people who complain about a donation banner are impossible to convince that they are wrong in doing so, but I see that people are donating, so at least it accomplished one good thing.
I increasingly find that donations should be the way open source projects should be financed. Showing banner ads in end-user facing software asking for donations towards the development of that same software seems like the perfect way to get attention for it.
This seems like an improvement. The beg banner sometimes appears above a document I am editing. This change will move it to the Start Center, which I never use. Who does? I just launch the LibreOffice app I want to use.
Why can't governments fund LibreOffice as part of their effort to wean themselves away from Microsoft? This seems like such an obvious thing for governments to fund for their own use and bequeath as a gift to their citizenry.
1. A lot of people aren't even aware of the alternatives;
2. There is a lot of backlash from people afraid to learn new things;
3. Even in IT departments, people who are used to administering MS networks will fight against it;
4. Does LibreOffice have a marketing department?
I wholeheartedly agree that governments should not only use Linux/LibreOffice in their bureaucracies, but that they should also finance and promote it, especially in peripheral economies.
I think OP's point is that certain government agencies have already transitioned or are in the process of transitioning. As such it would make sense for them to fund LibreOffice, given that they now depend on it.
In my country, the government would have to get something in return (support would be the most obvious channel).
LibreOffice has some obvious disadvantages: it does not have an office in my country, it does not offer support, and it does not lobby the government.
Previous efforts to push more OSS into government were obliterated by right-wing governments. You can guess why.
Anyway, most people don’t want to interact with office type documents, right? The only reason I have it installed is to deal with a problem usually generated by some big organization: documents that aren’t available in an accessible format like Tex, markdown, or html. Let the people generating the problem pay for it.
You are in a bubble. Most office workers want Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (or something equivalent) not markdown and numpy.
People been running libreoffice just fine in french administration.
They even prefer it to office because they are used to it now.
That supports my point: Office workers want to use an office suite for office work. They don't want to edit markdown and JSON.
My bad if I read your comment wrong. Thought you were saying that workers prefer Microsoft office.
I don’t think they really want these document formats, usually the requirement is imposed by management.
"Managment" usually are office workers.
I'm all for this. Unobtrusive and just enough to put it in folks mind. I'm not a big fan of the Author though.
How come there's no photos of the before/after? That would be much more useful than the condescension. They treat the reader like they've already whined with the least reasonable complaint. But they don't even bother to make their case properly, just point fingers at who else has done it, as if that's reason enough.
Wikipedia is NOT a good comparison. Their banners are obtrusive, obnoxious and the reason I stopped my $1/mo donation more than a decade ago. Well more specifically the begging/crying prompted me to look into their finances and spending and it turns out they were pretty irresponsible at least then. Lots of highly paid "administrators," software devs working on poorly thought out systems. Lots of interfering with volunteer contributions.
Donated just now, worth every coin for what Calc and Impress gives me.
26.2 has a Donate button on the bottom left of the window alongside showing recent documents and the opening and various sub application launchers. I rarely go to the generic Libre Office screen since I mostly launch documents or the individual applications so I hadn't really noticed it but currently its small.
The demand of users is infinite, even if they don't pay, in fact the less they pay the more demanding they may be.
You know when users gang up on Freemium companies that monetize with ads? Acting like ads are the evil of the world, it's just because they want free stuff and don't want to 'pay' with ads.
This is an even more extreme example, they want free stuff and they become entitled to it, it's very common in Open Source, there's this very famous GitHub issue that goes something like "I don't want source code, give me an executable don't bother me with linux stuff..."
User demands are infinite, the more you provide, the more they will complain to you, because you are the ones that solve issues.
If you see it that way, I think that you shouldn't be involved in any open source project and instead let others do it.
There are plenty of people that want to contribute in a open source project not because of the users but simply for their own need or because they believe in the project.
There's certainly a category of software where contributing to is fun and motivating, like music software.
But there's a category of software that's not fun to build and that users need.
Excel clone falls into the latter.
It's easier to pay for that work than to pretend that the work itself is the payment.
Remember this thread and this "controversy" next time some open source project talks about funding and people asking "Why don't you put up a donation button!" or "I didn't know it was this bad" or "they need to ask for money before it gets bad!"
Many of the threads here are shameful and ignorant.
I agree with them, nothing wrong to ask for a donation to keep the lights on. At the same time, it needs to be possible to disable this banner for enterprise deployments
It's open source so I'm sure there is a way. But maybe then the enterprise deployments can't depend on the freely provided binaries and hosting associated, and will have to build the project themselves and handle distribution.
If there's anybody who should pay for their software, it's enterprise. They should be able to disable the banner by paying a fair price for their office suite.
If Libreoffice, in addition to not have feature parity with MS Office, now has a similar per-seat pricing... what exactly is the value proposition?
I don't know. What value does non-paying enterprise users give to Libreoffice?
What value do non-paying FOSS users give?
Zero would be my estimate.
LibreOffice suffers from an extreme inferiority complex, which is why they overreact and get overly defensive about _everything_.
You have to take a correction for the fact that some FOSS enjoyers are on the spectrum and - like an African grey parrot - can freak out to however inconsequential changes in their environment.
I honestly forgot there was even a "base" UI to open documents from, i use libreoffice largely for spreadsheets and just open the spreadsheet program directly XD
Is there a roadmap for p2p collaboration? All I can find is an old post about experimenting about it. I’m happy to donate yearly to get it done.
I know it's a meta comment, but I like the way this article is written, does anyone know what style it is closest to?
> Moving the request to the Start Centre is not an escalation, but a change in location and frequency.
I support LibreOffice and what they're trying to do here, but this statement that it's not an "escalation" out of one side of their mouth and then admitting it's a "change in location and frequency" out of the other tells me that they are being disingenuous about it. An unobtrusive notice on where to donate seems like a reasonable direction, but if they don't view this obvious escalation as such, then what else will they do that they don't view as an escalation?
I don't understand this immediate reaction. What is it with people getting bitchy the moment a project starts asking for donations? Are people really that greedy that they would want something to be free forever? I mean sure, a corporation like MS might rug-pull like this (the freemium model or worse), but come on, guys, this is the Document Foundation that we're talking about. Unless I missed something massive, they have never once done anything like this, and it would be really, really weird for them to suddenly start doing this now. And they aren't the only OSS projects asking for donations, either. Are we going to crucify everyone who wants donations now?
> What is it with people getting bitchy the moment a project starts asking for donations?
Being angry is easy and fun, and writing angry, misleading articles gets ad views.
I wonder how many of the complaints are “real” and how many are propaganda.
LibreOffice has been an alternative to MS Office for a very long time. Including when Office was quite expensive at its cheapest. I can imagine there has been plenty of anti-libreOffice seeds planted in that time that are still bearing fruit.
Donation and tip fatigue. Can't go anywhere without being bombarded with beggars. FOSS used to not have this, people got that you were supposed to have a real job to support yourself, not cultivate a discord club of beta orbiter patreon paypigs, as is the modern style.
This... Is a really weird take. Really. Maybe, just maybe, people want to dedicate full time to OSS? Maybe they can't find a job? A donation is just that, donations. Quite different, I think, from a tip, in that there is no cultural pressure to donate as there is for tips. If you don't want to donate, don't. But don't complain when people kindly ask for them. (Also, a tip (especially online ones) is very different because, unlike a tip, you actually know the donation is going towards the entity your donating too, instead of you not knowing if the tip is going to the person it should be going to or if it's going to the company operating the service.)
Another pack of evil volunteers trying to give us free stuff. Vote with your wallet. Stop paying your $0 per month until these crooks feel the pain.
Off-topic, but I think this AI-generated post (probably just modified for clarity/language rather than full slop) could have used an additional prompt to dial down the combativeness ("overreacting") and reduce text length by 2x without losing any useful detail.
ya NO!
a very significant reason for useing linux is to avoid any and all distraction. Popups are a deal breaker, and a very very clear indication of the transition into just another part of the advertainment industrial complex.
you need money?, then help us become successful enough to pay the debt we feel.
poke me in the eye?
FUCK OFF
Not related to donations but product wise Libreoffice just feels so clunky and Java-ish to use. I switched to OnlyOffice a year ago and other than its almost complete lack of settings it's been so much nicer to use.
> and other than its almost complete lack of settings
And being made by Russians and used by Russian government.
Yeah I'm aware it sort of is (technically it's Latvian and there's a Russian holding company that owns that I think?) but at least it is open source and can be run locally and offline without any network connection (I have things blocked by default with LittleSnitch as well) https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai.... Russian software is pretty obviously more likely than most other countries to have security / privacy concerns doesn't inherently mean that it all does, American software presents a lot of privacy concerns internationally as well (not that I am by any means calling them equivalents!).
Yep, calling your users entitled and telling them they're overreacting instead of listening to them. That surely isn't going to backfire. It never did.
They lost me at putting "overreacting" in the title.
If that's the way they react to negative user feedback, they deserve more of it. Even Microsoft sometimes caves in if enough people complain - recall is now optional and I believe opt-in; there's noises about maybe not sticking AI in everything and letting you turn it off in future versions.
This is just belligerence and hostility cloaked in concern. This isn't a for-peofit enterprise that will regress back to Internet Explorer toolbar hell if we don't keep reminding them that we don't like it. This is a community-led effort, which you trust enough to run on your desktop, but apparently don't trust enough to not go wild with donation banners. What level of trust is that? Trust only as long as it benefits you?
Trust and user experience are two different things.
I would trust them not to spy on me and not to gather data for behavioural advertising whether they had no banner, a banner, or an autoplaying video every time you start Docs. I just wouldn't be equally happy with the product in each of those cases.
What bothers me is not the banner itself but their reaction to it.
Someone who handled this better recently: Mozilla got user feedback on their AI integration, and added an off switch.
> What bothers me is not the banner itself but their reaction to it.
What about the reaction to the banner? Do you care that people are being hostile to a project over a banner, or do you reserve your tone policing for projects responding to hostility?
> They lost me at putting "overreacting" in the title.
I think you just proved their point for them.
Soooo many comments here cite the "overreacting" point and then go on to prove it.
I don't mind that part, but I do mind resentment based reflexes completely detached from any analysis of any particular wrong.
It's perfectly fair game to call it overreactions, and even in this thread, no one seems to be disputing that that's what they are, the main concern is the analogy to Wiki's fundraising practices is an example of normal.
Life as an open source developer is often nasty, brutal, and in some cases short if they get pushed out of the game by hostile users who make it feel like a thankless task. They've been trying to sound the alarm on this, and I for one want to be part of what makes these developers thankful for the communities they have rather than frustrated.
I know sometimes I suffer from "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome, and I try and proactively balance out that part of my personality with lots of upvotes on good things (like the people in this thread noting that they donate to the project), and by being supportive of developers and people sharing their hobby projects.
The issue here isn’t that we’re asking for donations. The massive banner is significantly impairing usability. It’s wrong to ask for donations at the expense of usability.
On the start page?
To me, the start page is mostly just a giant "open" dialog, with huge buttons and not much functionality to it, there is more than enough space for a fundraiser.
I don't even use it that much. When I want to open a file, I click on it in the file manager. When I want to create a new file, I launch the appropriate program (ex: LibreOffice Writer), which defaults to a blank document.
The telling part about uselessness of that window is that the most visible difference between StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0 was that equivalent of this window was removed. It got reintroduced probably because it makes packaging LibreOffice for macOS easier.
While it may not be essential for experienced users, I think it is very important for beginners.
Imagine you know nothing about LibreOffice, except that it is an office suite. You download the thing, install it and now what? Most people expect to have something called "LibreOffice" that can be launched and does something sensible. That's what the start page is for.
It is also the reason why it is a good spot for a fundraiser. It tells new users that LibreOffice takes donations, but it will not get in the way of experienced users who already know how LibreOffice work as they are likely to skip the start page entirely.
what specific usability has been impaired?