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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I don't get what the word "libre" has with the "great free software nomenclature war" or why that would make people avoid LibreOffice.

It's also a very common word coming from the romance languages, with English being the strange one that doesn't make a distinction between free as in beer or as in speech. And in spite of what you may think, free as in beer on Windows means freeware and that kind of software has really bad connotations, hence the distinction is kind of necessary even from a branding perspective.

And btw, Occam's Razor applies: if LibreOffice has less success than OpenOffice on Windows, that's probably because there's no Sun anymore to promote it.

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A lot of end-users still mispronounce Firefox as "Foxfire". They don't understand what an operating system is and they don't know the URL bar exists so they Google everything.

If your friendly neighborhood computer nerd, like me, tells them to check out "Lee Bray Office", first they think that's a dumb name, and then they fail to find it online.

In the geek niche, yeah, LibreOffice is fine. Outside of that, it's a disadvantage.

(Doesn't help that the product was slow and buggy for a long time either, so for a lot of users, it became, "oh, it was that crappy Microsoft Office knockoff".)

I pronounce it more like "leeb-RAW-fiss"

> I don't get what the word "libre" has with the "great free software nomenclature war" or why that would make people avoid LibreOffice.

Personally, I avoid "office suites" in general like the plague and hence don't have much of a horse in this race, but "LibreOffice" has always struck me as a name that rolls off the tongue in approximately the way a refrigerator would roll off a flatbed truck.

Right, but I'm from Romania, our version is Liber (the original from Latin) and I can pronounce libre just fine. We also understand the word. And then we have to learn and use brands such as Microsoft Office, or Powerpoint, or Excel, even though these aren't Romanian words. Oh, the horror.

Good for you, but it seems like most people don't like the sound of LibreOffice when compared to OpenOffice since the complaint about its name is never far behind any mention of the product.

I suspect that's only because you speak to English speakers. That's sort of the point the guy is making :-)

Right and my point is that more people speak English than Romanian. English is also the de facto standard for international communication.

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