alt Hacker NewsWhile 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.