> in most people's vocabulary
In (monolingual) English speakers vocabulary.
In (monolingual) English speakers vocabulary.
Definitely no French R.
It's not a big deal to my mind. (shrug)
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.
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.