Hi Jean,
Following a search link provided by Ben Horst, I discovered the
interesting (and news to me) fact that someone has published the
full-page-size version of our books at much higher prices ($100 for a
download that’s free from us, and $43-$50 for a printed copy that we are
selling for around $20). I can’t imagine why that pricing, though it's
true that the full-page-size books cost more to produce than the smaller
page size that I offer through Friends of OpenDocument Inc. But why
would someone charge so much so much for the download?
And I notice that whoever it is, is using “OOoAuthors” as their store
name, provides no other contact information, and says nothing about
where the money goes. Does anyone know who is doing this? (Yes, I know
that under the Creative Commons license this publishing is allowed. I'm
just wondering who is doing it, and why they haven't said anything to us.
Seems discourteous at the least.)
I seems to be more than that. With the increasing publicity of OOo, there
are more and more websites which try to betray people searching for the
program. In Germany even civil courts are busy with hundreds or more of
that cases where people, downloading OOo from a special website, are
forced to pay 100 Euro for afterwards. The website-owners are sitting in
Oman or other exotic countries where they cannot be prosecuted :(
Now it seems that also our documentations have become an aim for such
deceptive aims. We will not be able to du much about it, except for
warning people wherever we can, I'm afraid.
In the German dev.group we decided to place a warning right on the
homepage of OOo which might be not very effective, because people who come
there, don't need to go to another site, but we have warned in the end.
Regards,
Wolfgang
