[foerbert]

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.

[robonerd]

"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.

[pessimizer]

> 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?

[JJMcJ]

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

[lupire]

> 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.