LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

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.

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.

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'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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

seems like a missed opportunity not to include a screenshot of said banner in this blog post

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.

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.

Smells like shareware from the old days. Didn't mind it then, either.

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.

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

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?

LibreOffice suffers from an extreme inferiority complex, which is why they overreact and get overly defensive about _everything_.

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 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?

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

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.