Hacker News Reader

Comment by verbify | Hacker News Reader

I thought everyone interested in a FOSS office suite was using libreoffice.

Actually for many years we have told people "if you want a free alternative to MS Office use OpenOffice". And we told this to people who are not closely following tech news. It's an established brand and it's not easy to undo. Many people will still google for openoffice. It would be helpful if they'd just get a message "OpenOffice is outdated, you can still download old versions, but you really want to get Libreoffice instead".

One of my OSS bits of software has an XSLX data export options, so I've been interested in the OpenOffice / LibreOffice split because of a bug in OpenOffice causing the file I was outputting to be read as empty. I've changed the file format now, but even for a tech based audience I got a number of questions about OpenOffice.

Just did a Google Trends on the topic [1] and it shows the two surprisingly close, confirming what you say, the openOffice brand still has momentum.

1: https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=openoffic...

> libreoffice

I hate that name. As a German I have no idea how to pronounce it and it's even harder for my non-techy friends. The name "Open office" has a very nice flow and everybody knows how to pronounce it, but "libre office"?

They should have selected an easier name for that project.

FlossOffice? even stranger, and make sure to use it at least once a day :-)

Floffice!

Sounds good to me! What we really need is school teachers that would nag their students to use it at least once a day, maybe then we as a society hopefully get rid of the pesky MS Office someday.

Would be popular among dentists :-)

Depends on the language, it's very easy to pronounce in Spanish

In French too.

But not the same way! I've never known whether the Spanish or French version is the canonical pronunciation for LibreOffice.

In English I just say Lieber-Office, as in Beiber-Office. I have had zero people confused at this pronunciation in the last six years.

(edited to clarify)

so, neither?

Edit to reflect parent: I do think that's probably easier to pronounce for English-speaking people than both French and Spanish

But libre mean "free" in French whereas there is no such word in English. Why would it not be more easier for us French speaking peoples?

That's not what I meant. What I meant is that it is harder to guess how to pronounce it to people that do not know French!

FWIW, I think the closest English analog would be 'liberated', a synonym of 'free', though not that this a substantial improvement.

? Libre is a french word in the first place. How is that hard to pronounce ?

IMO it's unintuitive how to pronounce it to most non-French-speaking people.

IMO only because you think that there must be one single way to pronounce it.

Who cares if somebody says laibr, laiber, leeber, ... Get over it and write a song like the one with the tomatoes...

Or are you one of the braves that are pushing Nike to change their name, because nobody can figure out that it should pronounced [nǐːkɛː]?

That would be easy to pronounce in German, but from the spelling it would never occur to a German that this is the correct pronunciation.

Fun sidenote: Since "Lieber" is German for "Dear" (as in "Dear Office, I am writing this letter to you ...") it would be quite confusing. (Also it would sound grammatically wrong, since "Lieber" is masculine, but Office is not.)

Alternatively "lieber" also means "preferably", so with that interpretation you would sound like saying "preferably Office". Oops.

Asia is the problem. FWIW - its the largest market for open source software and the market that needs it more than any other market. I posted another comment on this thread - but in India, I have had ZERO success with getting people to know what I said ("libby office")

I always use the Spanish pronunciation. Though this may be influenced by the fact that I'm a USAmerican and Spanish is my second language.

I tend to use the Spanish, because I find the French more awkward to combine with "Office".

It is just a name.

Really problematic was that after Oracle did not wanted to continue the OpenOffice(.org) project, Apache accepted to take it over. That kept the website people knew up and help spread the false image that OpenOffice is an active project with serious people and development effort behind it.

As a technologist who follows tech news, I was never sure which one was the more active/appropriate prohect. Switching to Google Docs and various plain markdown editors has been a huge relief.

A few years ago I said fuck it and bought MS Office. I may only need it once a year when markdown or gDocs doesn't suffice, but the price is worth avoiding the OpenOffice vs LibreOffice fuckery. It also works better.

Wikipedia is usually pretty good at giving an overview of the situation.

> In September 2010, the majority of outside OpenOffice.org developers left the project, due to concerns over Sun and then Oracle's management of the project

> […]

> In April 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History

But the OpenOffice brand was already built, so obviously a lot of people still think it is the most active project.

Presumably, Oracle did not know what to do with this asset they bought, but they thought they might be able to squeeze value out of it. They believed the only way to do so was to have total control over it, which removed all value from it (except for the brand). Then they put it in an Apache-shaped trash, along with the brand.

It's important to note, by the way, that Oracle had taken the Star Division developers off OOo and put them on their abortive CloudOffice endeavour. So the outside developers leaving was actually most of the active development resources at the time.

Development of OpenOffice continued after it landed at Apache, notably in the form of a large IBM donation of code from Symfony. It is only recently that maintaining the project has become an issue, and as the OP illustrates, the remaining community is engaged and grappling with how to deal with that.

There is rarely a name that is just a name. Names often have connotations that bring baggage with them.

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and… ”

Naming things and off by one errors

When the OpenOffice project was accepted by Apache, there was a distinct community around it which was larger than it is today. Now that the community has shrunk, you are seeing the people in it wrestle with how best to go forward responsibly.

At first I thought it was a pun on library names: lib-reoffice.

German has lots of common French words pronounced (roughly) the French way, plus some more modern English loanwords of course. So you just combine them and speak three languages in one sentence :)

Even in an American business context, "Libre" sounds stupid. Having it in the name hurts their popularity more than they know.

What connotation does "Libre" have in American English? (I'm French, to my ears it sounds perfectly reasonnable, if a bit "legalese")

I think it would register no recognition to the majority of American English speakers. It is a French loan word used essentially only in open source contexts because we don't have an equivilent ("free" is way more ambiguous is meaning).

The only negative connotation I know of is the association with some overzealous nerdy kids who find out the difference between libre and gratis and loudly bring it up all the time.

Italy here. "Libre" sounds spanish to me. I realized only now that french has the same word (and I read it many times), but probably the final e is silent. I pronounce it, so it's spanish. Apparently it's the correct way: https://lwn.net/Articles/408141/

As an American I agree with your assessment.

When I first saw LibreOffice I first thought it was a take on the comedy movie Nacho Libre. And I studied French, so you'd think that would help but not really.

Though the French pronunciation differs as the IPA shows /libʀ/ which is rather different than spanish /ˈliβɾe/. So its one of those "final e is silent, with a french twist" words that were maddening to learn after German where that almost never happens.

I don't no much French but I think in this case the final e is not silent but also not stressed. Stress is on the i, same as in the Spanish pronunciation I think.

I speak en-AU - I'm not sure what connotations "libre" has to most English speakers who haven't learned a Romance language or been involved in the Free Software world. "Libre" is not a common English word - I imagine to many English speakers you'd probably have to explain the shared etymology with "liberty" for people to get it. The French pronunciation is non-obvious to an English speaker.

"Liberty Office" would have been a much better English moniker.

Uggh... it sounds horrible ! Makes me think of the statue of liberty and US flags..

I don't think it has any connotation for most Americans. It isn't a word that is commonly used. I imagine that they hear it and think "Lee Bray" or Luche Libre wrestling.

Oh wait, I just had a thought: Luche Libre Office. That's is an awesome idea.

Cuba Libre!

That is to say, latin american freedom.

Cuba libre, a cocktail.

Thomas Paine always comes to mind, but I can't find any direct quotes where he used Libre. (American)

Most Americans don't know what Libre means. It just sounds like a European word... French or Spanish, perhaps. They also don't know how to pronounce it... Lee-Bray-Office, Lee Brooff-iss, Li-berr-office? It always felt like a missed opportunity when they chose that name.

It's an unfortunate side effect of FSF's fascination with being uber-precise around terms like "free" and "open". Because English doesn't offer sufficient nuance here, and Stallman really, really hates it when people get the implications that were not intended, he had to go look for, or create, a word that would be unambiguously "free as in freedom" (by FSF definition of freedom, anyway). And so he did - with the unfortunate side effect that no English speaker outside of that community knows neither the word nor the meaning.

Regarding pronounciation, libre = lee bruh (it might be said differently in different contexts, but I've only heard that pronunciation for LO).

Lee-Bray

Like Robert E. Lee and a donkey.

It's spanish, so 'lee-breh'

As a fellow German I'm surprised at that. Given the amount of negative comments about the name I recognize that English speakers have a problem with the name, even if I don't understand exactly why (no one complains about Cuba Libre). For us Germans: pronounce it French, Spanish or even German if you like and it will roughly sound right.

Naming turned out to be very difficult indeed.

http://luxate.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/agreeing-on-childs-name...

tl;dr trademarks in lots of countries, URL availability in lots of countries. This stuff is hard.

Everybody is using LibreOffice, except a poor few that get misguided by search services to the Apache OpenOffice website. IMHO there is no sane reason why Apache OpenOffice still exists.

Edit: Looks like there are a lot more OpenOffice users out there than I thought, sorry. I really thought the world would have moved on, at least since 2013/14, see

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/St...

pride and ego

This is not actually true; I am aware of lots of non-technical users who know nothing about Sun, Oracle, or Apache and who haven't heard of LibreOffice but who continue to quietly use the free office package they were recommended at some time in the previous 15 years. (For example: I'm a member of an online community of working novelists and just last week someone was advocating OpenOffice to another irritated Microsoft Word customer -- the OO.o user had never heard of LibreOffice and was very taken aback when I gave them an update on the history of OO.o post-Sun.)

While I agree that Apache OOo is effectively dead in the water as an on-going project, its continued existence has caused huge confusion among millions of users and there's now an equally huge public education campaign required to get them moved onto a modern, secure, maintained codebase.

The optimum strategy would be to turn openoffice.org into a redirect to LibreOffice, or to reassign the OpenOffice name rights to the LibreOffice project ... but egos are gonna ego.

> The optimum strategy would be to turn openoffice.org into a redirect to LibreOffice, or to reassign the OpenOffice name rights to the LibreOffice project ... but egos are gonna ego.

This is so simple. It would solve everyone's problems.

So of course that's never going to happen. Welcome to the real world :(

Apache is actually considering doing that: https://lwn.net/Articles/699110/

This is horrifyingly incorrect. AOO still gets a shitload of downloads. It wasn't until last year that LO overtook AOO alone's download total.

You would be amazed. Ordinary people know MSO sucks and want a free alternative. "OpenOffice" is the name they've heard as their exit.

The project is entirely trading on the goodwill that FLOSS activists built up for the name "OpenOffice" from 2002-2010. That brand is still powerful!

So whatever you do, make sure everyone you know uses LO instead of AOO.

e.g. I wrote this last year for Tumblr. Target audience was writers and creative people who aren't geeks but just want to do their stuff. Written after I encountered yet another innocent user who'd just got AOO. Please excuse the apocalyptic tone, (1) that's how you write to catch attention on Tumblr, (2) this was during the six months they had a massive hole in the default install and were spending their time defending the product on blogs rather than fixing it:

http://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/128873352708/urgent-get-t...

You might be interested in my impressions as somebody who hardly ever uses office software, but an open source enthusiast and keeps up with some tech news.

I was aware of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice split of course. I knew this would mean some confusion until the dust settles. My vague impression was that LibreOffice might be a better choice for supporting openness versus corporate ownership (and so I'd plumbed for that myself) but at the same time I worried that OpenOffice might end up being better managed and maintained than LibreOffice. I was not aware until I read this, that the dust was settling so comprehensively on the side of LibreOffice. More than just OS idealists buying into it, it's actually being maintained a lot better.

This is good news. The situation seems a lot clearer than previously, but yes the message needs to get out. Hopefully apache will shut down, redirect and facilitate re-merging the brand names.

MSO is closed, proprietary, whatever, but it's actually a fine piece of software especially compared to OO and LO. Word, PowerPoint and Excel are so good that people end up overusing them for stuff they're not intended to. Others like OneNote or Visio are extremely useful, too. They might not be the best on each category, but together it's a very powerful suite.

Plus, MSO is multiplatoform on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. I'm unaware of mobile versions of OO or LO.

Everyone I know, including myself, that uses OO or LO is because it's free (as in freedom for some, as in beer for others) and can read/write MSO files to an extent.

Is LO for Android not out yet? It feels like they have been talking about it for years...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.documentfo...

AFAIK, it also has an experimental editing mode. Yes, from what I've seen, development on it is slow.

The best way to update your acquaintances would be to tell them "The program has been upgraded and renamed to LibreOffice. OpenOffice is now the old, unmaintained version."

It's all true - from a certain point of view, and it transfers the trust on the software from the old brand to the new, without having to delve too much in the conflict that motivated the fork.

My father's been a happy Ubuntu user for years (and a fairly resentful one for a few more years --- he still misses the old GNOME user interface and loathes Unity). He mainly uses it for Gimp and LibreOffice.

When he had to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice he was pretty close to packing it all in and using something else; his argument was: why should he trust a package produced by an organisation that can't keep their own house in order?

That is, from the outside the schism between OpenOffice and LibreOffice is basically invisible; they're both considered to be the same thing, because they produce the same software. It's seen as an internal conflict, and it's a big reputational problem.

Has he tried Ubuntu MATE to get back the "old GNOME" style interface?

> and a fairly resentful one for a few more years --- he still misses the old GNOME user interface and loathes Unity

Why doesn't he use Mate? Ubuntu Mate is readily available on the Ubuntu website. Is he aware that it's a continuation of the old Gnome (Gnome 2)? And well-maintained to boot.

MATE is really a better GNOME2, some ppl don't want to believe it. There is somehow a parallel to OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Many non techy ppl don't know what forking is (for them it sounds as fornication). It adds to the confusion and we end up with a lot of users hesitating to try a better software.

I'm not sure MATE can be treated as "Gnome2 under a different name" at this point. While it started as a fork, they're doing some pretty massive refactoring, like gradually moving to Gtk3.

I've tried him on it a few times (I maintain his machine for him). It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation. Unity may be horrible, but it has much more robust QA testing.

Entertainingly, when I let him play with a bunch of different Linux desktop environments, the one he liked best was actually Haiku, which I threw in as a joke.

> It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation.

Really? I've installed Mate on ~10 computers, and have never run into UI bugs. I run Mate, my two kids run it on their computer, and I'm sometimes on that one helping them with school related stuff. Never run into UI bugs. I don't doubt that there are such bugs, but in my experience they're pretty rare (unless the project has taken a recent nosedive, always possible in open source).

I've run into some UI bugs using Mint Cinnamon, are you sure you were using Mate and not Cinnamon?

Do you remember what the bugs were? If it's something you can remember, I'll see if I can fix them so that future users don't run into them.

Not even slightly, sorry. It was a year or so ago.

I'll certainly give Mate another try the next time I upgrade him.

Another potential option is to throw Compiz in the mix after you have Mate up and running. Though that may make things more buggy than less, at least you can justify it with eye candy. :)

I tried MATE recently, I wanted to like it too but found it to be slower than Xfce.

> too but found it to be slower than Xfce.

Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if Mate is slower than Xfce, since it's traditionally considered more featureful. Besides, even using a cheap $200 netbook, desktop environment speed is just not an issue for me as long as I use linux + any reasonably fast DE.

Cinnamon might be another worthwhile thing to try.

I'm using OpenOffice because Libreoffice for some inexplicable reason defaults to PDF for printing even though I constantly set it back to postscript. The PDF feature is broken and swallows umlauts forcing me to print everything at least twice.

Oblig: please file a bug about this if you haven't already!

Do you have bug reports about PDF printing issues, I’d like to have a look myself (I have some interest in streamlining LibreOffice text layout code and part of it would be killing PostScript printing support at some point, but if PDF printing is buggy then it has to be fixed first).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com