I was confused by this too. If anything it should be harder for native English speakers unless they know French/Spanish also.
It's like the word "bazaar" - even if you say "baajaar", you will get most Indians to understand the meaning.
close to 90% asians will not even know the meaning of Libre even if you write it down.
Please understand, I am not debating the relative merit of using the word "open" as opposed to "libre" as a branding exercise - people just dont know what libre is.
Again, this is not about branding - "libre" is a word that is extremely difficult to pronounce, read and remember for a lot of asians.
Would LibOffice be better or about the same?
How about LibaOffice or LireOffice? (I know both 'li' and 'ba' or 're' are chinese syllables that can be written in pinyin.)
Even if they can't change, maybe there could be an official alt-name for native Asian-language speakers.
LibOffice would be infinitely better in terms of pronounciation.
Not that anyone who would use the root and assume is a library wouldn't already know better, but just sayin :)