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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Another pack of evil volunteers trying to give us free stuff. Let's vote with our wallets. Stop paying your $0 per month until these crooks feel the pain.
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.
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.
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 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.
Adding a mobile version, MS Exchange integration, supporting OAuth2 login, refreshing the UI periodically because otherwise everyone whines about how "dated" it looks.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, having Jimbo staring creepily in my face made me never want to donate to Wikipedia ever.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
LibreOffice suffers from an extreme inferiority complex, which is why they overreact and get overly defensive about _everything_.
seems like a missed opportunity not to include a screenshot of said banner in this blog post
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
Another pack of evil volunteers trying to give us free stuff. Let's vote with our wallets. Stop paying your $0 per month until these crooks feel the pain.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
I don’t think they really want these document formats, usually the requirement is imposed by management.
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.
what specific usability has been impaired?