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.
In (monolingual) English speakers vocabulary.
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.
Definitely no French R.
It's not a big deal to my mind. (shrug)
Most Americans at least heard of lucha libre, so the Spanish pronunciation is familiar.
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'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.
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 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?
This is frustrating but important, because uBlock not-Origin is a parasitical scam with good SEO.
What was your suggestion for a name and where were you when it was time to choose it? ?
But it doesn’t, outside of the Free Software fandom. They picked a name for themselves, not for their audience.
Come on.
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.
shoulda woulda
Yes, it's French for "free" after all.
The actual quality of the software is a seperate issue. I didn't interpret your comment as attacking the software. The office sofware anyway! :)
When I hear Open Office, I think "That dystopian floor plan corporations use when they decide cubicles aren't soul-crushing enough"
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'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.
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")?
Clearly the outcome anyone wants for their name. Nailed it.
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 THAT's a name I haven't heard in a while. And it does sound vaguely attractive, certainly more than the two alternatives.
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.
But even with these damaging examples which I agree with you about, it's still 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.
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.