Hacker News Reader

Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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...

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 ..

Hey, no terminal shaming here!

Apologies, not my intention ..

"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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com