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> Calling this “libre software” instead of “free software” seems very self-serving How so? When talking to a non-technical audience my experience has been tha

> Calling this “libre software” instead of “free software” seems very self-serving How so? When talking to a non-technical audience my experience has been that the term "free software" is misinterpreted more often than not. If a name always requires an ancillary explanation ("...as in freedom, not beer") and collides with a common and wildly different meaning then it is not a good name. "Open Source" advocates realized early on that the name was a fatal liability and switched to a significantly better one. Trying to rebrand free (as in freedom) software movement as "libre" is probably too little, too late but I don't think it hurts to try.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
Because the people doing it seem to run LibreOffice
- asoneth 4y ago
  Perhaps. It's also possible that this reverses causality and that they use the product name "LibreOffice" because of the existing term "libre software", rather than using "libre software" primarily because that's what the product is called. After all, "libre software" has been used in English since the 1990s, the EU was writing legislation about libre software in the 2000s, the Free Software Foundation has hosted an annual LibrePlanet conference since 2006, and even gnu.org recommends using terms like "free (libre) software".