And there you have the problem: You have to explain it. Good marketing requires that you engage with customers' existing understanding and expectations. "Well, you see, the name come from..." "Yeah, forget it."The name should not matter, what matters is that users of OpenSource/Free S oftware folks have an office suite that is not tied up to a single companyor entity that will control the code. AntonioAgain, exactly correct: the name _should_ not matter. Unfortunately names _do_ matter. Bad names do and have sunk good projects, whilst good names have successfully sold bad projects.
Hi Ron:Actually, I think that you will find that most latin-based languages will have not problems with the significance or pronunciation of the word "Libre". If you then take into account people who have studied a second latin-base language, they would have studied the word "libre" as part of their core vocabulary list. I am not sure of the other language base pronunciation of "libre". I think is this is the real issue that you are raising, the pronunciation. However, I don't believe it to be such a large problem. Yes, if you count the number of people who would need to hear an example of the accepted pronunciation of "LibreOffice" (as pointed out in one of the responses, the French version would approach more of the phonetic version of "leebrohfece" (for English speaking people), the numbers could be considered high. But in the context of people having enough cultural knowledge to pronounce the word without any coaching is probably quite extensive by comparison.
So, I agree with one of the responders who suggested that we could perhaps post a "sound" file (let's keep it as an OSS format) on the main Mageia page, in both male/female versions (hey, let's get a younger boy/girl version too!), of the accepted pronunciation of the LibreOffice suite. We can all remember the "Linux" pronunciation arguments, and in the end, the father of Linux decreed: "Pronounce it like you want!" It is just great that you can advocate its use to anyone who is willing to listen, regardless of the pronunciation.
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