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The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

by m12k18 hours ago|

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I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre means. There's a lot of good, free software that is selling itself short by communicating more about being the latter than the former.

by kleiba18 hours ago|

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I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...)

Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...

by joemi9 hours ago|

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"Windows" actually is related to what it does. As you might already know, before Windows, you just had DOS, which was 100% full screen all the time. Then Windows came along an let you run DOS programs (and Windows programs, of course) inside of their own windows, and let you have multiple windows open at once. Then, only after that was hugely successful, it became its own standalone OS. So at least at the time it was created and became popular, its name was very related to what it did.

by lukan17 hours ago|

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The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved.

So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..

by kleiba17 hours ago|

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Hey, no terminal shaming here!

by lukan12 hours ago|

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Apologies, not my intention ..

by socalgal25 hours ago|

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You're not wrong but neither IMO is the person you're responding to. emacs wasn't renamed LibrEmacs. gcc wasn't renamed Librecc. "Libre" can both be trying to convey something, and an arguably a bad name that turn lots of people off.

by Dwedit20 hours ago|

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One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.

by bbkane15 hours ago|

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To me that sounds awesome

   func RebootItAll()

by madduci19 hours ago|

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At least they signal that the project is open and free. What about projects using "Open" but they aren't? (See: OpenAI)

by abirch18 hours ago|

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Almost any name is better than GIMP.

by pawelmurias15 hours ago|

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It would be impossible to come up with a name that reflected the nature of the gimp program better.

by PowerElectronix20 hours ago|

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That's like asking a EU product to not be named Euro-{product}.

by whywhywhywhy17 hours ago|

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Also cringe and tainted.

by progx19 hours ago|

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LibreOffice ?

by notachatbot12319 hours ago|

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Yes, that is one of the major offenders. It is very awkward to pronounce in many languages.

by kalterdev19 hours ago|

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I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.

by notachatbot12317 hours ago|

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A good indicator is that the Wikipedia page even has pronounciation information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

What other major software has that?

by bloak17 hours ago|

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> What other major software has that?

Linux?

EDIT: Also Qt, MySQL, SQLite, GIMP (rather unnecessarily), ...

by mock-possum13 hours ago|

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Somewhat disappointingly, it’s just pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled: LEE-bruh-OFF-iss

Ref: https://youtu.be/YHBve8v13VY?si=Bql2vH6C4goZN_kX

From your comment somehow I was expecting something a bit more exotic

by socalgal25 hours ago|

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TIL it's 'bruh'. Until today I thought it was 'bray'

by desdenova18 hours ago|

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Curious on what languages have a hard time saying Libre.

Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).

by zimpenfish14 hours ago|

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> even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood

I'd go for "LEE-broffis" which I don't think is all that hideously far away?

by tech_hutch6 hours ago|

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Wait, it's not leeb-er?

by scj3 hours ago|

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The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.

"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.