GoKawiilA donation banner is not an attack to users
The announcement that LibreOffice 26.8 will feature a donation banner in the Start Centre has prompted a flood of responses, ranging from positive from many FOSS supporters, who understand the need for funding, to mild apprehension to extreme alarm from others.
Some articles have described the change as an “aggressive fundraising campaign” and suggested that it is part of a dangerous trend towards “freemium” models and paid features. However, it is worth taking a step back to analyse what is actually being introduced and the broader context that many of these comments have ignored.
The banner will appear in the Start Centre – the screen that greets users when they launch LibreOffice without opening a specific document – and will occupy roughly the bottom quarter of the screen. It will not block any functionality, nor will it restrict access to any features. According to the implementation plan, it will appear periodically, but not at every launch.
That is all that is changing. It is a request that is certainly not intrusive, given that the Start Centre is a screen that many users – at best – glance at for a few seconds before opening a file.
Media coverage has largely omitted the fact that LibreOffice has been displaying donation requests for years. Previous versions displayed a banner above the open document roughly every six months.
Moving the request to the Start Centre is not an escalation, but a change in location and frequency. In fact, displaying the request in the Start Centre rather than above an open document makes it less intrusive for users. Therefore, the outrage is directed at something that has been there for a long time and has been quietly accepted by users.
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 campaign messages, for most of its existence as an independent project. This has never generated such controversy, nor has anyone ever accused Thunderbird of becoming “aggressive”. No slippery slope has been identified, and the software remains free and open source.
The same logic applies to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation displays prominent, often full-screen donation banners to its hundreds of millions of readers every year during its fundraising campaigns, with banners that are considerably more insistent than anything LibreOffice is planning. The reaction from the public and the tech press has consistently been sympathetic, not hostile.
The asymmetry is instructive. LibreOffice introduces a monthly banner on a screen that most users view for just a few seconds, and this immediately becomes controversial. Thunderbird and Wikipedia have persistently displayed donation requests for years, and the community has regarded this as normal.
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