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.
I have this same feeling with donating blood (in most EU countries you don't get paid for this so it is completely charitable).
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.
I donated blood for 25 years in Italy (I can’t anymore due to health reasons). Here we have a semi-public organization (AVIS - Italian Blood Volunteers Association) that handles donation and distribution. Zero stress, no “pushy” reminders, everything is completely voluntary. The trick is that by donating blood you receive your blood test results (a very comprehensive panel). It’s a mutually beneficial “do ut des” arrangement that is highly appreciated (and it helped me detect a serious issue at an early stage).
In addition, AVIS is a very community-oriented volunteer association that builds a sense of belonging and awareness.
One of my favourite criticisms, yes their procedure works, but it probably doesn't measure rejection rates. "We hounded these 1000 people for a donation, 60% responded favourably". Okay, but out of the 40% that didn't respond how many are you never going to see again? Who were those 40%?
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?
Why not just click the “unsubscribe” button on any of those emails you complained about getting? Seems like blaming marketing for a lack of self-agency to opt-out, but I suppose we each have our own metrics. I’ve donated, got emails, clicked one button, stopped getting emails. Guess it just seems the complaint is very solvable, but I do partially understand your point.
I really appreciate their comment describing their overreaction on a post about people overreacting when asked for donations. Goes a long way to prove TFA's point
Of course, recurring payments work completely differently. A shockingly large fraction of recurring payments are from people who never got around to cancelling it. They're already getting what they want, any email just risks disturbing this situation.
I still get yearly email summary of my donations. They don't need to send more, and they could not send it if their objective is to stay under the radar
What drove me away from ever donating to Wikipedia again was that they asked me to put them in my will. For when I die. Absolutely disgusting. It reminds me of that one character from Glengarry Glen Ross.
Why is that disgusting? That's an extremely common revenue stream for charities. I know some charities where the majority of their income is derived from wills.
Consider the situation where someone who’s geriatric and potentially losing their mental faculties is getting hit with messages like that. Catch them at the wrong moment and they could well change their will, despite it not being what they would have wanted.
Ugh. The persistent nagging fundraising drives are probably the main reason I haven’t donated to Wikipedia even though I feel like I should.
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.
Same with political donations in the US. I gave to one campaign 10 years ago and I've been getting consistent requests for donations since. So now they all get marked as spam.
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.
How do people notice that? I'm sometimes reading about that here, but in reality I never ran into an issue where I couldn't find anything any more or that I often re-visit the same article and would notice changes.
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.
Well, that is the thing, people complain and then everyone is sad why projects die or get taken over by corporations, because there are bills to pay, and not everyone can live from charity.
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've noticed a very sudden uptick in users of FOSS software being so low trust that they will see a small change, assume it's much larger, and then retreat to some rationalization that it's still bad when shown it's pretty small (slippery slope / boiling frog type arguments). I'm not too familiar with this story in particular but I have been following the Systemd birthdate field controversy, and it's exhausting. I don't even think of myself as that high trust compared to the people taking issue, but it's like they're in a completely different world. Is this actually a trend (in specific, not the general loss of institutional trust) or am I only now paying attention?
I donated - it's valuable software and I love it very much. My feeling is as long as it's not hounding me for future payments i.e. calling me up during the day, it's fine.
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.
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.
I increasingly find that donations should be the way open source projects should be financed. Showing banner ads in end-user facing software asking for donations towards the development of that same software seems like the perfect way to get attention for it.
> 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 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.
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.
It's one thing for you to put a banner up on your web page, which I will see when I visit you. I can just choose not to visit, if I don't want to see your message.
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.
How are you supposed to make an informed decision to simply not use libreoffice when they pop something like this on people unannounced, undisclosed, without precedent?
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.
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 wonder how many of the complaints are “real” and how many are propaganda.
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 honestly forgot there was even a "base" UI to open documents from, i use libreoffice largely for spreadsheets and just open the spreadsheet program directly XD
The demand of users is infinite, even if they don't pay, in fact the less they pay the more demanding they may be.
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.
If you see it that way, I think that you shouldn't be involved in any open source project and instead let others do it.
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.
You have to take a correction for the fact that some FOSS enjoyers are on the spectrum and - like an African grey parrot - can freak out to however inconsequential changes in their environment.
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 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.
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 (EDIT: that is, race conditions that are the local client's responsibility).
Adding a mobile version, MS Exchange integration, supporting OAuth2 login, refreshing the UI periodically because otherwise everyone whines about how "dated" it looks.
I was going to say that this kind of post is pointless, because the kinds of people who complain about a donation banner are impossible to convince that they are wrong in doing so, but I see that people are donating, so at least it accomplished one good thing.
Remember this thread and this "controversy" next time some open source project talks about funding and people asking "Why don't you put up a donation button!" or "I didn't know it was this bad" or "they need to ask for money before it gets bad!"
Many of the threads here are shameful and ignorant.
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.
Off-topic, but I think this AI-generated post (probably just modified for clarity/language rather than full slop) could have used an additional prompt to dial down the combativeness ("overreacting") and reduce text length by 2x without losing any useful detail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While it may not be essential for experienced users, I think it is very important for beginners.
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.
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.
This is just belligerence and hostility cloaked in concern. This isn't a for-peofit enterprise that will regress back to Internet Explorer toolbar hell if we don't keep reminding them that we don't like it. This is a community-led effort, which you trust enough to run on your desktop, but apparently don't trust enough to not go wild with donation banners. What level of trust is that? Trust only as long as it benefits you?
I don't mind that part, but I do mind resentment based reflexes completely detached from any analysis of any particular wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How ridiculous would that be, users that get stuff for free setting the rules on how they should receive the free stuff.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Many of the threads here are shameful and ignorant.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.