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Comment by yuumei | Hacker News Reader

Wow that list of commits is brutal. Libre Office is dead. Just another corporate take over of an open source project.

Based on that table it looks like “LibreOffice the name” ejected “LibreOffice the software development project” basically. Although, it isn’t really a corporate takeover, right? There was one company that was doing most of the work, now they’ve been ejected.

So why not just fork it under a new name.

> So why not just fork it under a new name.

Again? Sigh. Isn't that how we got LibreOffice in the first place? (From OpenOffice.)

Freeoffice as the next name? Seems like they are exhausting them quickly.

I believe OpenOffice is so dead that the name is available again? That would be kind of hilarious, though probably untenable.

I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway. Maybe they can a more distinct split will give it a more independent identity.

Since Collabora already has an online version, maybe they should fork completely and call this offline version something that implies independence. So, I suggest: SolOffice. Haha.

> I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway.

It was really a terrible name if you're going after normie office workers. Nobody outside of open source people knows what "Libre" means or even how to pronounce it.

I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000 downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct downloads from their respective websites, thus not counting Linux distributions, in which the default office suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.

I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.

From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.

You have to ask yourself how does a dead project yield 230k downloads a week?

OpenOffice is by far the better name and has a potential brand recognition that LibreOffice never will.

They already have their version, it's called Collabora Online/Office.

Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.

I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.

LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity. Being identifiable as a bad project’s better fork is kind of a weak starting position.

That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.

Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.

That will just create another dead fork that no one works on.

LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think that the new fork will be the living one.

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