<h2>What’s being added</h2>
<p>LibreOffice 26.8, due in August, will include a donation banner in the Start Center. It takes up roughly the bottom quarter to third of the screen and has already been merged into the development branch, though the current version uses placeholder text and a rough example image. The final wording and visuals are still being worked out.</p>
<p>The banner is intended to appear after each update or once a month - not every time you open the app, despite some early reports suggesting otherwise.</p>
<h2>Why The Document Foundation is doing this</h2>
<p>LibreOffice has over 100 million users and runs almost entirely on individual donations. Corporate support exists but is inconsistent. TDF is a German non-profit with publicly available finances and a charter that legally requires it to produce free software, so the concern some people raised about a creeping freemium model doesn’t really hold up.</p>
<p>TDF also points out this isn’t new territory. LibreOffice has shown donation prompts for years. Mozilla Thunderbird and Wikipedia both use similar or more prominent fundraising banners, and neither sparked the same reaction.</p>
<h2>The backlash</h2>
<p>Some users weren’t happy when the feature surfaced in development builds. TDF’s response was essentially that the reaction was disproportionate - the banner doesn’t block any features, it’s periodic rather than constant, and the project genuinely needs the money to keep running.</p>
<p>The broader point TDF is making is that free and open source software sustainability is widely misunderstood. A project serving 100 million users still has real costs, and a non-intrusive donation reminder is a pretty mild way to address that.</p>


Collections

LibreOffice 26.8, scheduled for August release, will add a donation banner to its Start Center that occupies roughly the bottom quarter to third of the screen. The banner will appear after each update or once a month, not on every launch. The Document Foundation (TDF) introduced this to address sustainability concerns for a project serving over 100 million users that relies primarily on individual donations. TDF pushed back on backlash by noting the banner is non-blocking and periodic, and drew comparisons to similar fundraising approaches used by Mozilla Thunderbird and Wikipedia. Concerns about a creeping freemium model were dismissed given TDF's legal charter requiring it to produce free software.

LibreOffice 26.8 will show a donation banner in the Start Center