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Comment by yoodenvranx | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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 :-)

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 :)

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".

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.

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

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.

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

It's spanish, so 'lee-breh'

Lee-Bray

Like Robert E. Lee and a donkey.

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