It made a sense few years ago, now Libre Office has a brand of its own. I don't think having the ownership would be useful now.

OpenOffice still a much stronger brand outside of the Linux community. Basically all the non-technical people I know (including some very non-technical people like my father-in-law) know that OpenOffice is the free alternative for MS Office. I'll bet not one of them have heard of Libre Office.

I know some people using LibreOffice, because some technical friend or I installed it for them, and keep calling it OpenOffice even if they see the LibreOffice dialog every time it starts. I think it's a brand who's become the name of a product class, like Xerox in its heydays.

This is me. My mind still thinks OpenOffice, then I remember it's really LibreOffice now.

I still think and say "open office." LibreOffice is that thing that I downloaded when I heard about OpenOffice being insecure.

Probably the lesson to learn here is that an open source project should do as much as possible to keep its branding separate from its parent companies.

As far as I can tell, the "LibreOffice brand" is "OpenOffice but harder to pronounce and spell".

I don't think so, I have talked to many of my friends about OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and no surprise, majority of them heard about OpenOffice but not LibreOffice.

I'd wager that most of LibreOffice's brand recognition is by people who are aware of the fork

Nope. A non-techie friend at uni was still using OpenOffice on their laptop, I had to tell them to install LibreOffice.

Because non-tech people do not know about LibreOffice. They've heard of OpenOffice, and that's it.

Maybe Libre Office could take over the branding, making "0pen Libre Office" (OLO for short, not to be confused with LOL). That way even ppl searching for Open Office would find a good free Office suite.

How about "OpenOffice, known as LibreOffice west of the Rockies"?

Now that's doubly confusing -- it implies that Libreoffice is a separate project which is proprietary, as well as being redundant.