Hi, On 2005-12-23, at 12:16 , John Sheridan wrote:
if you do a search on ebay for openoffice, hundreds of sellers are listing your software as a link to purchase from THEM? are you aware of this?
Yes. It is legal.We have an About Us page on EBay that supposedly helps in limiting crass exploitation.
are they paying you any royalties or donations?
Some assist in the project. See http://distribution.openoffice.org/ cdrom/
The point of this project, which is led by Alex Fisher, is that we can help normalise the code offered to users, as well as adding things to it that enhances their experience of OOo, such as documentation, etc. What we really do not want is for endusers to get terrible versions of OOo that sour them not only to us but to open source in general.
as great as your software is, I think if they are selling your software, they should be paying you for it.
I think, quite strongly, that one has the civic responsibility of contributing, too, provided one can. It hardly goes without saying and needs in fact reminder: Open source is not simply (usually) gratis.
I hope there is something you can do.
Well, see above. Every now and then, I will contact eBay directly. To me, it's no surprise that since 2.0 we've seen many more of these. 2.0 is very good software! and it's easy to make a buck off it among the gullible of the earth.
But many distributors are not unscrupulous. Hence the website and project.
BTW, there was a recent discussion of this topic in the Marketing Project, and one of the sellers responded at length. His response: http://tinyurl.com/dljqe
Cheers and happy holidays, Louis
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