Comment by yamtaddle

3 years ago

On the other hand... OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice. Clearly the name was immensely valuable in that case.

7 comments

yamtaddle

Reply
GuB-42  3 years ago

Is it?

I quickly accepted LibreOffice as "the new OpenOffice". It happens all the time, MariaDB is the new MySQL, uBlock Origin is the new uBlock, etc...

I expect that if Gitea messes up, the community will quickly fork and the fork will overcome the original. And considering the scope of the tool. For people who install and manage Gitea instances, keeping up to date with the tech world is often part of their job, so I don't expect a name change to be such a big deal. Gitea users are typically developers, which I hope are tech savvy enough not to be thrown off by a change in logo (assuming the instance is not rebranded).

  • account42  3 years ago

    You may have quickly accepted LibreOffice, but it took 5 years for LO to overtake OpenOffice and to this day the OO name is still plenty popular: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=OpenOffice,LibreO...

    And this is for a case where the overlords of the old name have done fuck all with it - imagine how the situation would be if someone with more interest and marketing sense than the Apache Software Graveyard would have gained control of the name.

ipaddr  3 years ago

The new name was the issue, it was too clever and close to the original. OfficeSuite or IceOffice or TerraOffice. Something about the word Libre makes it seem like the outdated copy.

red_trumpet  3 years ago

Sure it was immensely valuable. But imagine if the code disappeared overnight. Then LibreOffice wouldn't be were it is now.

  • yamtaddle  3 years ago

    > one of the most important assets

    Emphasis mine. I think that's a defensible statement about names/trademarks for any project that's gained meaningful traction, and Open- vs. Libre-Office is an apt illustration of that.

  • afiori  3 years ago

    If LibreOffice's code disappeared or was stolen overnight they could pretty quickly get it back from one of their many forks, if their trademark/domain/package names got stolen or lost it would cause lasting damage.