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Comment by resoluteteeth | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice.

Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice.

Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available.

In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365).

Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly.

Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.

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Yeah, that was me, I totally downloaded it as the first thing when setting up a new computer for years. I thought the errors opening some excel documents was because it was open source. Little did I know it was effectively abandonware.

I like name LibreOffice much better.

Maybe because when I tried using OpenOffice while I was at university it sucked really bad.

I tried LibreOffice like 5 years ago and I am using it day to day and I donated money to them and consider donating again.

Yeah, when I hear Libre Office, I think "That FOSS word processor"

When I hear Open Office, I think "That dystopian floor plan corporations use when they decide cubicles aren't soul-crushing enough"

It might be that - Libre seems to sound or feel more like "free". Where "Open" feels like corporate BS, maybe even worse like corporate BS that some crushed soul came up with.

Meh, I guess it's all subjective, but OpenOffice has a certain alliterative, authoritative-sounding ring to it. The name LibreOffice feels clunky & hokey in comparison. It's a bummer that the latter wasn't able to adopt the branding of the former.

Agreed, also "libre" is a gnu/jargon word which doesn't exist in most people's vocabulary, and probably seems meaningless or foreign.

> in most people's vocabulary

In (monolingual) English speakers vocabulary.

As a French native speaker I find it even weirder. How is "libre" even pronounced in an English name?

Sort of like Libra but with less emphasis on the second vowel.

Definitely no French R.

I pronounce it as something like /'liːbreɪ/ (LEE-bray). (It definitely feels to me like a conscious foreignism.)

My mom's German. I grew up in a bilingual household.

It's not a big deal to my mind. (shrug)

According to my dictionary, the pronunciation of "libretto" (an imported, but already established English word) in IPA is [lɪbr'etoʊ]. We can extrapolate from this.

Wouldn't that lead us to pronounce it as "lib-RAW-fuss" instead of "LEE-bray-off-fuss"? Not that it wouldn't be funny.

It would lead to that pronunciation as English likes its schwas and disappearing schwas, just like French does. (Someone else pointed out that "swallowed" schwa is closer to the French pronunciation, too.)

I've lived in parts of the country where "libre" and its counterpart "gratis" were somewhat more common English vocabulary words, and their pronunciations were much more in line with "rhymes with zebra" (LEEB-ruh) and "rhymes with lattice" (GRAH-tuhs). To be fair, those were parts of the country with a bit of a "South midwestern" drawl and some might take those to be lower class, "less educated" pronunciations, but they certainly sounded a lot more like the natural pronunciations of such words in English to me.

All I’ve heard in Australia (from only a very few outside my family) for LibreOffice is /'lɪbriː/, LI-bree.

In this case, I hear it as "lihb-ray-office" from random users.

Most US English speakers will pronounce it the Spanish way.

As in Spanish.

leeb-ray

Most Americans at least heard of lucha libre, so the Spanish pronunciation is familiar.

Even for monolingual English speakers, like myself, it only takes two or three braincells to make a guess that "libre" comes from a Romance language and probably relates to the word liberty. That gets you close enough to understand the sentiment behind the name LibreOffice.

I don't think the Libre name is a problem at all. It's just one of those things people too cynically think will be a problem for other people. The real problem for LibreOffice was losing all the brand recognition OpenOffice managed to accrue in the years before everything went to shit.

I don't quite agree. It's not so much the meaning as the ease of use that's the problem. You don't need to have any worries about pronouncing, nor spelling, OpenOffice correctly. You can tell somebody about it without going through the whole "Huh? That's how you say it? Are you sure that's right? How do you spell it again?" routine.

I'm not saying it's the whole story, or even the biggest part of it. But it adds a bit of friction to getting the word around about the new name. See uBlock Origin for a more successful example, where the mere mention of uBlock had, and still does to an extent, "you mean Origin, right?" as a default, low-effort response.

"Lee-bray"

I don't know if the French would approve of that pronunciation, but it's good enough for me and seems like an intuitively obvious way for me to pronounce it. The word looks obviously French, and monolingual English speakers encounter French-looking words often enough that it doesn't give many people pause. Just pronounce it like it was English and put on a fake French accent if you want to get fancy with it.

I won't say there is zero friction from the word Libre, but it's certainly much smaller than losing all the built-up brand recognition of OpenOffice, and even that is much smaller than the elephant in the room: the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and the trouble any competitor will have no matter what name is used.

I think people fixate on the name because that's the easiest thing to change. But changing the name would only make things worse, by once again wiping out all accrued brand recognition. Even if you ignore that and want to talk about a hypothetical situation where it was named something else originally, the project would obviously still be an obscure oddity in the global Microsoft monoculture.

> I don't know if the French would approve of that pronunciation, but it's good enough for me and seems like an intuitively obvious way for me to pronounce it.

I say it the same way.

Here's the catch: if you pronounce it at someone as a recommendation i.e. "you should try Libreoffice!", how likely are they to remember it when they get home, or to be able to spell it to search for it?

You do know there is also a Spanish language, where "Lee-bray" is pretty close for an English speaker.

> mere mention of uBlock had, and still does to an extent, "you mean Origin, right?" as a default, low-effort response.

This is frustrating but important, because uBlock not-Origin is a parasitical scam with good SEO.

Hell, at the very least it makes me think of Nacho Libre - and who doesn't like Jack Black?

> and probably seems [..] foreign

Yes, it's French for "free" after all.

It's free in Spanish too. The word has a Latin root.

"Why did you put this French stuff on my computer instead of All-American™ Microsoft?"

LibertyOffice?

Absolutely better. OpenProductivity? When I ddg it, the third hit is OpenOffice, so they're probably buying it, it's so good. CornerOffice?

This right here. I don't know many regular folk that ever use the word Libre, but many use the word open and office.

I just think of the Nacho Libre movie with Jack Black.

That part of the open source community literally prioritises linguistic whimsy over success.

In that particular case the openoffice name was trademarked so they wanted to find something bearing a semantic ressemblance.

What was your suggestion for a name and where were you when it was time to choose it? ?

> bearing a semantic ressemblance

But it doesn’t, outside of the Free Software fandom. They picked a name for themselves, not for their audience.

The name sucks, but libre absolutely does bear a rather non-trivial semantic resemblence to open.

Come on.

Not to mention Libre being a synonym for Free Software (the GNU kind).

Approximately zero people understand that connection in the general population. They're screaming at the choir.

That is not true

Like 1 Billion people in the world are native spanish or french speakers and understand libre verbatim. Add to that most people speaking a latin language will also understand it despite the slight difference in spelling. Most people speaking english know the word liberty and those that have an IQ higher than an oyster do figure it out easily.

Additionally you don't have to have a connection for a name to work. I mean there are a lot of software used by millions of people without them never ever thinking why they are called like that.

People in this thread, so technical people, who already have an interest in OpenOffice / LibreOffice, are saying they don't even know how to pronounce it!

I still ain't seeing your suggestion for a better name.

Asking people like me is how you get a crap 'developer art' name like the one they have - they should have asked a professional!

I guess you were already a generous donator back then already then!

shoulda woulda

I think crowdsourcing a name by polling the public will get you something like OfficeMcOfficeFace, and that is if you are lucky. So if this is your roundabout way of pointing out that the name could be even worse, well played.

I mean, at least OfficeMcOfficeFace is memorable and straightforward to pronounce.

Yup. When I hear OpenOffice I think of something professional. When I hear "libreOffice" I think of the Adwattia icon set and gnome crashing because of some broken default.

I don't know why you're downvoted. LibreOffice is the superior product and perfectly good, but this is a perfect expression of the mental image the two names evoke.

The actual quality of the software is a seperate issue. I didn't interpret your comment as attacking the software. The office sofware anyway! :)

One of the problems with OpenOffice was/is that it's a trademark in Brazil and the Netherlands. I don't know much about the Brazilian case, but in the Dutch case it's a small IT consultancy focusing on Linux and other Open Source stuff. Especially given they operate in the same kind of space that OpenOffice.org (the office suite) it's led to some amount of confusion.

LibreOffice sounds like a co-working space founded by college libertarians.

I am not really a hipster type - but still like that name :)

I like name LibreOffice much better.

"FreeOffice" would have been better, if available. If you want mass adoption, use a word the masses use.

Apple doesn't spend billions on branding because it doesn't work.

There is indeed a product with the name FreeOffice, in the same category, by SoftMaker.

Maybe call it something other than "X"Office? The names are too few and too generic to be a meaningful distinguisher, IMO. It's like how every hobby assembly is <letter>asm. Slapping "free/open/libre" in front of a generic word has limits.

Freeoffice as a name is a bit reminiscent of the junkware you used to get on discs with magazines.

I wonder what the modern equivalent is, probably the websites that show up in results if you google for US free tax software or video conversion tools that are just bad ad-filled guis around ffmpeg probably.

Many of the people using it are not old enough to remember that.

And I would wager many of the people in that group of not being old enough to remember it are not in the market for any desktop office suite.

> I like name LibreOffice much better.

There's no accounting for taste, but if past threads on the topic are to be believed, there is not even a consensus on how it's pronounced. That alone makes it a highly questionable product name.

I can only imagine this is split between those who (correctly) think it's pronounced "Lee-bra"[1] (like Libra the star sign) or "Lie-bra"[1] (like fibre).

I can't imagine how on earth it would be possible to be so unaware of other languages that one could even arrive at the second option.

[1] In both cases the A is a "short" A.

"Lee-broffice".

This is is how I say it, knowing it's technically wrong and sloppy but my convenience trumps that.

Clearly the outcome anyone wants for their name. Nailed it.

Re-fork it to just "Broffice". $$$

As has been mentioned, libre is also a Spanish word, and an anglicised pronunciation derived from Spanish would be something like 'lee-bray' (although of course the last vowel isn't a diphthong in Spanish).

You've found a pronunciation that I've never heard a single person use (your confidently "correct" one.) The second one, "lee-burr", I've heard. "Lee-bray" is nearly correct if you think it's from Spanish, and "Lee-bruh" is nearly correct if you think it's from French, where the "a" is a schwa (ə), not a "short a."

I had forgotten about Spanish pronunciation (more like "Lee-br-eh" than "Lee-br-ay" if memory serves correctly, but was about 35 years since doing a couple of years of Spanish in school so I won't be nearly as over-confident).

I was thinking of French and meant "the "a" is a schwa (ə)" when erroneously calling it a "short a", I never know the correct names for the different vowel sounds.

I'm really not sure how you arrived at "a pronunciation that I've never heard a single person use". I may have used wildly incorrect terminology, but given the star sign example I'm curious how you pronounce Libra that is so wildly different from "Lee-bruh" (being a reasonable approximation of French "libre")?

I pronounce it "lee-bray" office, but that's probably my southern US roots. lol

Speaking purely based on the name, not the actual software:

What comes to mind when I hear the name LibreOffice is historically mediocre FOSS that you'd only choose for ideological reasons, which is why the libre part needs to be advertised up front. When I imagine what it looks like, I'm imagining some creaky UI that looks like GIMP from 1999. It's worse, even, than OpenOffice, because OpenOffice is the obvious name if you're going for the ideological angle, which suggests that LibreOffice is a shitty knockoff of a shitty knockoff. Honestly even StarOffice is more appealing to my ears.

I'm positive that all of this is deeply unfair, but that's what comes to mind. Part of the negativity probably relates to conflating LibreOffice and OpenOffice in my head.

Now when I will hear libreoffice again, what will come to mind are clueless illiterate gringos ridiculing themselves on hacker news.

> because OpenOffice is the obvious name if you're going for the ideological angle

I disagree. I associate "Open" with corporate-interest driven "open source", BSD licensing, and cynically misleading branding (OpenDNS). 'Open' is the word you use if specifically don't want to invoke GNUy left-adjacent ideologies.

Open Server.

But even with these damaging examples which I agree with you about, it's still better.

> StarOffice is more appealing to my ears

Now THAT's a name I haven't heard in a while. And it does sound vaguely attractive, certainly more than the two alternatives.

My embarrassing mistake is that I don't accidentally call Libreoffice Openoffice as often as I accidentally call it Staroffice.

> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice

It gets about 235,000 downloads/week, most of which are for Windows.[1] It doesn't seem SourceForge shows the absolute number of downloads, and while ~235k/week isn't a huge huge number, it's still pretty significant. Dunno how this compares to LibreOffice or other software packages (e.g. Firefox).

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/

It's a pretty darn high number.

Compound interest on that negative goodwill...

You can click on the chart symbol next to the number

Ah, that's very non-obvious!

Summing up the daily numbers the total downloads is about 1.7 million for the 4.1.12 release from May.

> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice

I'm far away and can't help my parents. They recently replaced their computer and asked a local tech to reinstall their apps. I told them to ask for LibreOffice. The guy put OpenOffice...

The damage from Apache is real and massive.

Saw openoffice on a friend of my father's laptop a while back. it had a 4k screen and OO did not support it, causing every pixel to be 4x the size of other applications, it looked really awful. I told him to download libreoffice instead and that openoffice was not being developed anymore. He thanked me and told me that he had been annoyed by how awful it looks.

so yeah, it definitely happens

I bet if I polled friends and family the ones who know the name OpenOffice would outnumber the ones who know LibreOffice 2:1. And it's only that favorable for LibreOffice because I know quite a few other computer nerds.

I know people who even nowadays install OpenOffice and I have to explain them that it's not what they should be using, etc, etc.

I just learned this right now, by reading this.

If you let the project die on the vine however, you can clean up after it dies without having to take the hit for actually being the ones to kill it.

Apache is in an unenviable position, here. Might as well let nature take its course.

I really don't understand why Apache doesn't just put the OpenOffice branding on LibreOffice. Is there any real reason to not just make OpenOffice a branded distribution of LibreOffice at this point?

edit: oh right, licenses. LibreOffice is MPL, and the Apache Foundation won't touch it.

My guess would be corporate bureaucracy

> but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice

Definitely. I have been using OpenOffice for years until I found out by accident that LibreOffice exists... It's a shame!

Thank you for your post. I am one of those users and I'm downloading officeLibre now. Open office has been usable but plagued with random issues.

They need to switch OpenOffice to LibreOffice and use both names for the same product (which is called today LibreOffice).

> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice

I wouldn't be surprised if as many or more Windows users were downloading it than downloading Libreoffice. The problem is that the name isn't punchy and is unpronounceable in English. Plenty of people who are completely knowledgeable about the situation still refer to Libreoffice as Openoffice.

It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft, and destroyed the entire Apache Foundation for me. I avoid all of their projects, because if that project has a commercial competitor with deep pockets, I can't trust it not to be intentionally bad or broken.

...I'm a native english speaker and I've never had trouble pronouncing libre, is it a problem for others? I've always said "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong, I never gave it a second thought.

That's a perfectly fine pronunciation, but the point is that it's not an English word, so plenty of people will think it looks weird or not know how to pronounce it.

What till you hear how many non English words are in your everyday vocabulary.

Words in my everyday vocabulary are English words by definition, regardless of whether they're of foreign origin, in the sense that I meant.

"Libre" isn't an English word at all; not even as a loanword from a foreign language.

"Lee-bray" is closer to accurate.

I think "Lee-breh" might be closer to accurate.

FTR, the accurate French pronunciation would be something like leeb-roffice, the "e" in "libre" being absorbed by the o.

But in any case, I agree with GP that the naming is meh.

As a native english speaker, that seems a really much better way to say that awkward combination of syllables.

I see! French pronunciation omits the 'e': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre

I was thinking of the Spanish pronunciation.

Probably, I'm just doing a bastardized Spanish pronunciation.

"unpronounceable" is technically hyperbole, but the point is true. It's just an annoying speedbump both reading and speaking. Actually more so in writing than speaking.

Speaking, I don't bother to even try to be technically correct, I just say leebruhoffice. It's honestly about exactly as fast and easy as openoffice, but 1, it's only made equivalent by being wrong and sloppy. 2 still the mental process of reading it is just, more work, somehow.

The name just isn't as good at what good names are good at. It's ok. It's accurate. But it's not good. It's just annoying to crank out and stumble over in a way that neither StarOffice or OpenOffice are. NeoOffice is good on those fronts but is bad simply because the word neo is too I don't know, stupid. I can't take anything seriously that calls itself neosomething. "Drive the new neorunner..." pass.

yeah, plus if you tell someone to "download libreoffice", there's a good chance the thing they're going to type into google is going to be something misspelled.

having watched Nacho Libre (Jack Black's "sport" comedy) many years ago, and laughing hysterically all the way through, I have no problems with the Libre part.

But it ends in libre. You aren't trying to go from libre to O-something.

It needs a consonant of some sort. Maybe thats why oopen office works is because it's going from an N to the O.

I couldn't put my finger on that untill you just said that. Part of the problem is definitely that that transition is just awkward.

Maybe they can take one of the excess ducks from duckduckgo. LibreDucks even works better than libreoffice.

And I'm all the way with you on the movie.

I usually pronounce it like 'lee-bur', though at times I've tried a more French version which is closer to 'lee-bruh' but it doesn't flow nicely into 'office'. Hearing 'lib-ray/lee-bray'/'lib-er' (like liberty) I would know what you mean though.

This just means it has ambiguous pronunciation, and there are many things like that. It's not "unpronounceable". Something unpronounceable to an English speaker would be something like words using a non-latin character set or words using latin characters in long or unfamiliar ways like random Finnish words or some words resulting from trying to romanize another language.

Just FYI, in French, we would just skip the "e" and say something like leeb-roffice.

That rolls off the tongue quite nicely in French.

I'm a native French speaker and when speaking English, I just say "Office" because LibreOffice sounds weird. And for similar reasons, I never say "I used The Gimp". I do very much appreciate both projects. Naming is hard.

the gimp is just exceptionally awful, and was apparently intentionally named after the gimp from pulp fiction, which makes it even worse

> I never say "I used The Gimp".

Have you seen Pulp Fiction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B34DmsMxUlA

we had some people at work running a copy of librespeed, and they kept pronouncing libre as LEE-BER I had to correct them once a week for 2 months before they got it.

If Linux has taught me anything, when spelled all lower case like that, that is clearly lib-respeed

I have that problem sometimes looking at the name libreoffice, too. It's the Reoffice library, clearly

Great, now I can't unsee this.

Thank you for this! Now I have a reasonable way to pronounce it.

> "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong,

That's fine, but if you're curious, the Spanish pronounciation is "li"- as in "list" or "ligament" and "bre" as in "Brenda" or "bred".

> but if you're curious, the Spanish pronounciation is "li"- as in "list" or "ligament"

This is... not correct. Spanish pronunciation would be LEE-bray. The "li" is similar to "bLEEd". And for proper style points make sure to flip the "r".

It's not bray. You would stop on bra without the y

You're half right. The "bre" e is pronounced like pen or bed, not bray.

And here I thought the schwa just wreaked havoc in English.

Outside of my home country of New Zealand, I think very few English speakers pronounce either "pen" or "bed" with a schwa. (actually, even we don't)

No, not "bray", just "bre" as in "bred" (from OP example).

Native Spanish speaker here.

I'm honestly having a hard time listening to the difference between English "li" and "lee". If you mean how "lee" tends to hold the vowel for longer, maybe you're indicating that that syllable holds the phonetic accent in "libre", which you'd be right about. Fundamentally though, they sound the same.

Not sure what you mean by flipping the "r".

To me (another native english speaker) it's not that pronouncing "libre" is hard, but that then combining it with "office" makes for a clunky awkward mouthful. Whereas "open" and "office" flowed together quite well.

> It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft

Do you have any evidence for this? I would like to think that HN is above making these kinds of totally unfounded accusations.

(I'm not affiliated with any party here and don't care about the conflict at all.)

No evidence, but that doesn't mean that they're unfounded, that means that they're unproven. There's only one party that profits from the confusion, and it's a party that spent a fortune on bribes (or "grants" or whatever) during the OOXML debacle.

Sort of like making an unfounded accusation against Microsoft that can't be disproven. C'mon, we are all better than that here.

The commenter is right to the point. Look at the sponsors of Apache foundation, and you'll see that Google and Microsoft appear as some of the largest contributers. Of course they don't want to antagonize these companies.

The best way to look at Apache and simular foundations is as infrastructure maintained by big companies to redirect open source effort to their goals. They use third parties to do this because the companies themselves enjoy very little trust from the open source community.

So, no evidence. Just FUD. Got it.

The Apache Foundation has next to zero input into how any of the projects are run, so even if this were true it would be irrelevant. How exactly do you imagine this influence working? It would have to be quite overt to have any effect on so many projects that are self organising.

They have 100% control over what projects they office.

I just read it as "lib-reoffice" cause it's impossible not to if you've done manual package management in the past :-D

Someone should sue them, for knowingly, willlingly releasing bug ridden, security issue laden software.

Seriously.

This is a perfect test case.

It should start with a 15 day demand letter, and progress from there.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

A warranty is not the same as willful negligence.

Why is there no resposnibility on the part of the user?

The software equivalent of “shall not be infringed”.

I see downvotes, but there is a difference between "our stuff has a bug" and "we're actively keeping this project alive, including updating binary downloads, even though we know it has endless CVEs, some of them years old."

One is an innocent problem. The other is willful negligence.

And we need to start suing for this sort of thing. We need fines for companies willingly causing harm.

> we need fines for companies

I think the reason you’re getting downvotes is that Apache is a non profit foundation, not a for profit company. So fining them isn’t going to do a lot of good (as well as being very unlikely to succeed)

> Apache is a non profit foundation, not a for profit company. So fining them isn’t going to do a lot of good

Why?

I don't see why fining non-profits is any less effective than fining for-profits.

It might be effective... but is it doing any good?

If you think getting OpenOffice off people's machines is good.

Possibly even more effective.

The point is to get them to fix, or take it down.

A fine per day, until compliance, can motivate well.

Being nonprofit doesn't mean you can willingly hurt people (getting hacked) either.

A fine for what crime?

Nonprofits can obey a court orders same as anybody else. When they are obviously in the wrong, it is hard to understand why they would resist.

That said, it is hard to understand why they resist good sense now.

Except, "Apache is where free software projects go to die."

> And we need to start suing for this sort of thing.

Sue them... for what? What do you plan to put in your paperwork? What are you going to say to the judge?

Knowingly distributing a faulty product with risk of harm to the user ?

I think you’d have at the very very least specify an actual harm against you, and even then you’d likely be told immediately that they have no obligation to provide anything given there’s no support contract.

How would you define "faulty" and "harm"?

rm will unapologetically delete files instead of using the "trash bin" semantics that many people are used to. Some would define that as "faulty", and it can certainly cause "harm" (a "rm fuckup" is almost a rite of passage).

You can find many such almost banal examples, ranging from well-known tools to some project a student uploaded on GitHub that sees basically 0 traffic. Opening up Open Office to a lawsuit also means opening up countless GitHub projects from 15-year olds riddled with SQL injections and the like, but also things I put on my GitHub five years ago and don't really care about. Ignoring a PR would mean risking a lawsuit.

Plus, do we really want government involved in telling us what software we can and can't put on the internet? Because that's what this would mean.

"They should be sued for distributing outdated insecure software" is a fun one-liner, but the ramifications if it would actually happen are huge and almost entirely negative for the Open Source world.

IANAL, but the license includes both a a disclaimer of warranty and a limitation of liability. Further I think to sue you need to demonstrate actual harm. Absent a security breach, for which you might get a day in court, they haven't harmed you.

Stop using their software. Stop bullying people with lawyers.

> This is a perfect test case.

Indeed, and maybe your legal theory fails.

There are plenty of jurisdictions where such a disclaimer is void. France, for example, probably. Or anyway somewhere in Europe.

News that Apache had been forbidden to perform downloads to France, and then more places, might help raise awareness that it shouldn't be downloaded at all, nohow.

Maybe it would even push Apache to stop offering it entirely, and to link to the Libreoffice site instead.

> There are plenty of jurisdictions where such a disclaimer is void. France, for example, probably

I would be surprised, as such disclaimers are included in the official French flavor of the GPL family (http://cecill.info/licences.fr.html); section 8.2.

I would assume that the disclaimer protects the copyright holder but not the distributor.

The European approach to consumer protections is generally more about ensuring that things are safe by default than about warnings and disclaimers. A lot depends on the expected competence of the target audience. If you distribute professional tools directly to professionals, they can be expected to read the warnings and understand that misuse could be dangerous. If you market and distribute something to the general public, ensuring safety is your responsibility.

> I would assume that the disclaimer protects the copyright holder but not the distributor.

Why assume when you could check? Because the license text shows that you're wrong, just read section 8.2 once again.

Because it's a matter of law. Legal protections often override licenses and other contracts.

Well, the CeCILL licenses have been validated by the French institutions themselves, I hope they know their own laws better than you do.

So, someone should put all of the free and open source software at risk (if the "we guarantee nothing" part of their license doesn't hold ground for them it holds ground for no one) because you want to attack the ASF for not doing what you want? What a great plan.

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