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Comment by nervechannel | Hacker News Reader

Dear gods, please, someone give it a better name.

Sadly, superficial things like names are important if you want to compete with better-known products.

I can't even pronounce LibreOffice fluidly -- there are no words in English (I think) with a schwa followed immediately by a short 'o' sound, so no native English speaker is phonologically equipped to deal with it.

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It's a great name, it prominently displays Liberty. This is much better than Open because the word 'open' is being used for all kinds of software that isn't (Open Document Format vs Office Open XML)

Ideologically it's good, aesthetically and phonetically not so much.

Interesting. I never thought of it as "liberated office", I thought of it as "without charge office / free office" and I despise the name LibreOffice.

Hey. Why don't they call it LibertyOffice? That would be awesome.

It may be a 'great' name ideologically, but the fact that there are three other comments in the thread giving three different ways it's pronounced, shows a certain degree of name fail.

EDIT: Sorry, five different pronunciation suggestions at last count.

"leeb-roffis" works for me

I take the "libre" as (sort of) a Spanish "lee-bray", so it's no more difficult to pronounce than "payoff" or "layover".

Does it even need to have the word 'office' in the name?

They could have just picked a short web 2.0 missplelled-on-purpose-with-missing-vowels name, that's easy to say and search for.

Libr?

Then MS Office users who aren't computer geeks wouldn't associate it with MS Office at all. In the IE vs. Netscape battle it probably was a big factor that "Internet Explorer" had the work "internet" in it - if a computer-illiterate person wants to surf the internet, which icon will they click?

Good point. I have seen some linux distros rename apps according to functionality. So instead of a "Firefox" entry in the application menu they'd have "Browse The Internet" or just "Internet".

Just put a soft glottal stop between the schwa and the o, or just pronounce them as two words.

yes - please. I wrote about it previously : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129846

Not sure where you are from, but this definitely doesnt work in Asian countries.

Libre is from French, so it would be said "libroffis" which works fine.

I suggest Red Stapler Office.

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