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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Honest/weird question.

This is (at least) time number two, that OSS projects have used the "Libre/Libera" term in community reboot/rebrand efforts. Nothing against speakers of French which have given us so many beautiful words, but there is something off putting about libre/libera for me in "brand names". I like what they stand for even! They just don't roll off the tongue for me. Is this just a "me thing"? Maybe there's something inherit about the actual phonetics that makes it off putting for me?

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Interesting, when I hear libre, I think Spanish. It comes from a common root word across all the Latin languages, and that has also given us "liberty" in English.

Anyway, it doesn't bother me. It's better than "Free", which is mostly misunderstood, RMS's rebranding attempts notwithstanding.

I agree that "libre" does not roll off the tongue well. It's a rare pattern in English, shared with words like cadre, timbre, and macabre. Those are nouns, so they're not followed by another word in the same way as e.g. "libre software". We have other words like theatre or acre or lustre that we pronounce as if the e and the r are switched. That could work for libre, pronouncing it like "mediocre" (the only other adjective I know of that is spelled that way).

Libreoffice rubs me in a particularly wrong way, because until someone explained it, I did not know whether it was "libre office" or "lib re-office". Either one is strange (the former especially awkward because of the two vowel sounds back-to-back).

For what it's worth, I believe that it's usually typed either "libre office" or LibreOffice, and so the confusion there should be minimized.

And a lot of English speakers at high-school or above level would probably be able to associate Libre with Free / Open.

I will agree that OpenOffice was a better name.

French speaking people pronounce it "libroffice". Lots of final "e" are silent in french.

It's just a you thing. Much of the world is not English speaking, and many languages (including English, by the way) use the libre root. It has a well established meaning as a specific meaning of "free". I'd even go so far as to say that "libre" itself is virtually an English word now. Sorry you don't like it. Maybe learning a second language will help.

Where are you from? I am Swedish and I feel these names work just fine both in Swedish and in English.

Amurhica. :) However, I do speak Norwegian (and can limp med Svenska). Even if I tenk på det på Norsk, det fremdeles er samme :D. GratisNet would have been kult I guess. Or ÅpneNet.

GratisDNS in Denmark is weird enough, let’s not go that route. ÅpneNet, now that is something I want.

Works fine in Dutch too, imo.

I've already misspelled it is libra a couple of times.

Don't forget Libra coin/currency that was going to solve all the worlds problems :P

It means 'free' without people instantly associating it with 'zero cost'. Or at least that was the argument back in the day.

All things being equal, I would prefer fewer syllables to pronounce when possible. But I'm a lazy English speaker.

Wow. Anglocentric much?

Just wow.

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