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Comment by vntok | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

How does LibreOffice save people hundreds?

By providing a free competent competitor to other Office software bundles.

Oh come on. If you can create a better program without ever asking for donations, feel free to do so.

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.

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.

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