The announcement that LibreOffice 26.8 will have a donation banner in the Start Center has sparked a flood of reactions, ranging from positive reactions from many FOSS supporters who understand the need for funding, to mild apprehension from others to extreme concern.
Some articles have described the change as an “aggressive fundraising campaign” and suggested it is part of a dangerous trend towards “freemium” models and paid features. However, it is worth taking a step back to analyze what is actually being presented and the broader context that many of these comments have ignored.
The banner will appear in the Start Center – the screen that welcomes users when they launch LibreOffice without opening a specific document – and will occupy almost the bottom of the screen. It will not block any functionality, nor will it restrict access to any feature. According to the implementation plan, it will appear from time to time, but not at every launch.
That’s all changing. It’s a request that certainly isn’t intrusive, given that the Start Center is a screen that many users – at most – look at for a few seconds before opening a file.
Media coverage has largely ignored the fact that LibreOffice has been fielding donation requests for years. In previous versions a banner was displayed above the open document approximately every six months.
Moving the request to the Start Center is not an increase, but a change in location and frequency. In fact, displaying the request in the Start Center rather than on top of an open document makes it less intrusive for users. So, the outrage is over something that has been around for a long time and has been tacitly accepted by users.
No one is comparing with Mozilla Thunderbird, which, for most of its existence as an independent project, has asked for donations from its users practically every time it launches, with clearly visible banners and campaign messages. This never caused any controversy, nor did anyone ever accuse the Thunderbird of being “offensive”. No slippery slopes have 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 millions of readers during its fundraising campaigns each year, banners that are far more intrusive than LibreOffice plans. The reaction from the public and the technical press has consistently been sympathetic, not hostile.
The contrast is instructive. LibreOffice introduces a monthly banner on a screen that most users only look at for a few seconds, and it immediately becomes controversial. Thunderbird and Wikipedia have displayed frequent donation requests for years, and the community has come to accept this as normal.
The solicitation of money by Thunderbird and Wikipedia is widely considered a reasonable consequence of providing a free, ad-free, universally accessible resource.
The same understanding should naturally extend to LibreOffice. All of these projects provide some exceptional value at no cost to the user, supported entirely by voluntary contributions. The only real difference is that Thunderbird’s and Wikipedia’s funding models have been around for a long time, and thus they have become culturally normalized.
This difference in response has less to do with convenience and more to do with the particular expectations that some people in the FOSS community have of office software, sometimes based on a sense of entitlement.
Some comments have also suggested that the donation banner is a first step towards a “freemium” model, whereby some advanced features are hidden behind a subscription. This issue deserves to be addressed directly, as it has no basis in fact.
The Document Foundation is a German Stiftung (a non-profit foundation) legally established and governed by a charter that clearly defines its mission: the development and distribution of LibreOffice as free and open-source software.
Its finances are public, and its governance is transparent. The structural and legal constraints imposed on TDFs serve as a protection for users, providing a wild flight of imagination to the claim of “a banner today, a paywall tomorrow.” Claiming otherwise without evidence is a blatant attempt to undermine the work of thousands of volunteers over the last sixteen years whose sole purpose is to serve users.
The real issue is the stability of FOSS. LibreOffice is used by more than 100 million people around the world, including governments, schools, businesses, and individual users. Collectively, they save billions of euros or dollars per year in proprietary software licensing costs and take a fundamental step towards digital sovereignty.
The Document Foundation operates mostly due to individual donations and a very small number of corporate contributions, amounting to less than 5% of the total amount. Like most FOSS projects of comparable size, it consistently achieves a lot with few resources.
The Foundation has always been transparent about this reality. The donation banner in the Start Center is not a sign of desperation, but a reasonable and proportionate attempt to make the funding relationship between the project and its users a little more visible.
Unfortunately, the way this feature has been covered in the media suggests that the debate over the sustainability of free software infrastructure is poorly understood.
The alternative – a project that gradually loses contributors because it is unable to support them – is bad enough, as it affects everyone who depends on free and open-source office software.
Finally, a non-intrusive banner that appears monthly on a transition screen and asks users who save hundreds of euros or dollars per year to consider making a voluntary contribution is not reprehensible, but rather a respectful request for support for a project that has evolved over sixteen years and wants to continue to do so.
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