Hi everyone, I'm really excited about the project, but I'm a bit concerned about the name. What concerns me is that one can't tell how to pronounce the name. Some pronounce it "librehoffice", some (including me) "leeberoffice", some may even pronounce it as "libberoffice". I'd really like to take this opportunity (as LibreOffice is not yet widely known) to really get the name right -- I mean, for most software, this opportunity tends to come only once. I know that the domain name has been already bought, sure, but it's vital for software to have a good name. For example, one reason the search engine Cuil failed was because it had a strange name: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/09/19/cuil-once-touted-as-a-google-killer-appears-to-be-dead/. Google and Photoshop, on the other hand, had such good, unique, easy-to-pronounce names that they became common words. Word and PowerPoint have gotten into common language too, with "a Word document" and a "PowerPoint presentation", although they haven't been and probably won't be turned into verbs. Another thing that always bothered me with the "OpenOffice.org" trademark and now applies to the "LibreOffice" trademark too, is that, when you first hear about it, it sounds like an Office knock-off (in the same way that "Adidos" sounds like a cheap copy of "Adidas"), which it essentially still kind of is. I really prefer the way Apple and IBM went about this with "iWork" and "Symphony" (Symphony, especially, has a nice ring to it). Firefox and Chrome didn't need to use the word "Internet" within their names to be successful, and neither do office suites need to use the word "Office" in their names.
What do you think? Should we brainstorm names and vote on the best one, or is it too late or too complicated to change the name now? -- To unsubscribe, send an empty e-mail to discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted. List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/
