LibreOffice and the art of overreacting
blog.documentfoundation.org
blog.documentfoundation.org
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.
If you have donated blood, every 2-3 months they will send you an e-mail for a new donation cycle. That's fine. But if you don't respond, they will send another reminder. Then a text. Then they will call you.
Yes, you can just click the "Not this time" button, and click the reason for denying in their web portal, but sometimes you're busy.
I understand that this procedure probably nets them more donations, but the feeling of being lightly hounded never escapes me, and it makes me slightly less agreeable about donating, even if it would never be a reason for me to not donate.
In addition, AVIS is a very community-oriented volunteer association that builds a sense of belonging and awareness.
Organized this way, the system works.
My wife works in a line of business where up-selling is a debated issue. Most of the industry thinks it's good, because they see more sales on the products that are being pushed, but they never measure how many people are actively turned off by the aggressive sales tactics and won't return in the future and now buys absolutely nothing.
It's baffling to me that organisations never measure negative impact from campaigns, because maybe you're pushing away the wrong people. E.g. maybe your most reliable patrons are the most adverse to your campaign and now you have to work even hard to reach your goals next time, as these people are not coming back?
I love the Symphony and support their mission but it is hard for me to imagine ever giving them a donation again. It seems like it's inviting ruin.
One time I donated to a Red Cross appeal and over the next decade I’m certain they spent more than my original donation on spamming me with physical junk mail trying to extract more money from me. Never again.
The first one came right after my donation.
I guess it works for them but it's crazy to me that all these orgs basically make you regret ever donating in the first place.
Ironically, though, I've donated to Wikipedia and they've never bothered me more.
Edit: I'm not implying they wouldn't bother you, though! I have no idea.
It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.
But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.
There is some movement to try to fix this.
Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.
I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.
I'll check out oath.vote (maybe).
Because I work in software and I've known plenty of people in this industry that treat the unsubscribe button as a "there's a real user getting these emails" button
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.
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 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.
Also, you might want to read the article. LibreOffice specifically points out the banner was moved, and not added or removed.
But to get to the meat of your question, trust is lost through betrayal. Organizations have been deciding unpopular policies without consulting their users, or having meaningful methods for users to opt out or push back. For a long time, users assumed open source would be the last bastion of privacy and user freedom, and then were shocked when those values were not actually shared by maintainers.
The paternalistic perspective that the organization knows users hate something but push it anyway is always going to lose trust. That practice needs to stop, and instead consider how open source can treat the user base as important stakeholders.
Plus there’s been a lot of public to private migrations like minio and others that feel like total rug pulls.
I am with you that the birthday field is blown way out of proportion, but I’m also positive that once that’s enforced governments will use this to restrict whatever they don’t like arbitrarily (see LGBTQ book bans).
Trust in open source devs is definitely down. There was that book lore app drama just a couple weeks ago because the dev used AI, and the community didn’t like AI (which escalated poorly).
Nobody really cared how the open source sausage was made, but now it’s the most important thing to people.
Entitlement and, really, some of this crosses the line into bullying of the foundation and the maintainers, should be dealt with robustly. It will help to reset expectations around what's reasonable for the relationship of those developing LibreOffice with the community of users.
People need to recognise that they get a huge amount of value out of LibreOffice, for which they aren't required to pay a penny, so it's not unreasonable to be asked if they would like to contribute something back in return.
But amongst large populations of people, when it comees to free things, some portion of that population will always undervalue that free thing and fail to recognise how much benefit they get from it and start acting entitled. There's nothing wrong with calling that out.
When reading it, I kept thinking that the writer was too emotionally involved.
Nobody's lost their temper. In no world does the article read like anyone has. That's you applying your own interpretive lens to the text, not what the text actually says.
(But actually, alienating the troublesome portions of their userbase might actually help them and the LibreOffice community over the longer term. C.f., firing customers.)
> Media coverage has largely omitted the fact that LibreOffice has been displaying donation requests for years.
Bringing thunderbird under the bus
> 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 then Wikipedia
> The same logic applies to Wikipedia.
Answering to 'comments'
> Some comments have even suggested
C'mon don't tell me it's professional, it looks amateurish.
First rule: you don't give out names.
Second rule: You don't push the fault on other even when it's their.
Third rule: you don't answer to 'comments', 'tweets', and so on. You say 'we heard feedback that this and this'.
I say it again, it feels like it's been written by a guy alone, no supervision whatsoever, and who didn't have the The necessary step back.
Making a statement of fact about media coverage isn't "bashing". And when you start off your argument by characterising it that way you've already lost.
How ridiculous would that be, users that get stuff for free setting the rules on how they should receive the free stuff.
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.
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also consider trusting them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive, in which case you might wanna give them a hint (e.g. by detailing how you would imagine it would work instead in terms of finances).
If you trust the makers of LibreOffice enough to run their software on your machine, you might also want trust them on this decision. Unless of course you know better than them about what it needs to keep the software alive you run regularly.
I think it makes sense, how else are they supposed to fundraise and develop the features that makes the software useful to manage your own data?
Showing that actually pretty intrusive banner would undermine their argument.
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...
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.
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 Thunderbird. It is just a poor abandoned child.
Mozilla, maybe.
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.
You are still making wild assumption without actually thinking about what means to writing an email client.
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.
Would have been a better comparison than Wikimedia I guess, but aside that, the LibreOffice team still has a valid point that the reactions are unjustified.
In a week nobody will talk about it anymore though, so LO team, just sit it through :)
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.
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.
They even prefer it to office because they are used to it now.
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.
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.
There are plenty of people that want to contribute in a open source project not because of the users but simply for their own need or because they believe in the project.
But there's a category of software that's not fun to build and that users need.
Excel clone falls into the latter.
It's easier to pay for that work than to pretend that the work itself is the payment.
Many of the threads here are shameful and ignorant.
Being angry is easy and fun, and writing angry, misleading articles gets ad views.
LibreOffice has been an alternative to MS Office for a very long time. Including when Office was quite expensive at its cheapest. I can imagine there has been plenty of anti-libreOffice seeds planted in that time that are still bearing fruit.
I support LibreOffice and what they're trying to do here, but this statement that it's not an "escalation" out of one side of their mouth and then admitting it's a "change in location and frequency" out of the other tells me that they are being disingenuous about it. An unobtrusive notice on where to donate seems like a reasonable direction, but if they don't view this obvious escalation as such, then what else will they do that they don't view as an escalation?
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
And being made by Russians and used by Russian government.
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.
I would trust them not to spy on me and not to gather data for behavioural advertising whether they had no banner, a banner, or an autoplaying video every time you start Docs. I just wouldn't be equally happy with the product in each of those cases.
What bothers me is not the banner itself but their reaction to it.
Someone who handled this better recently: Mozilla got user feedback on their AI integration, and added an off switch.
What about the reaction to the banner? Do you care that people are being hostile to a project over a banner, or do you reserve your tone policing for projects responding to hostility?
I think you just proved their point for them.
It's perfectly fair game to call it overreactions, and even in this thread, no one seems to be disputing that that's what they are, the main concern is the analogy to Wiki's fundraising practices is an example of normal.
Life as an open source developer is often nasty, brutal, and in some cases short if they get pushed out of the game by hostile users who make it feel like a thankless task. They've been trying to sound the alarm on this, and I for one want to be part of what makes these developers thankful for the communities they have rather than frustrated.
I know sometimes I suffer from "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome, and I try and proactively balance out that part of my personality with lots of upvotes on good things (like the people in this thread noting that they donate to the project), and by being supportive of developers and people sharing their hobby projects.
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.
Imagine you know nothing about LibreOffice, except that it is an office suite. You download the thing, install it and now what? Most people expect to have something called "LibreOffice" that can be launched and does something sensible. That's what the start page is for.
It is also the reason why it is a good spot for a fundraiser. It tells new users that LibreOffice takes donations, but it will not get in the way of experienced users who already know how LibreOffice work as they are likely to skip the start page entirely.