To Whom It May Concern: My name is Mustapha Talantikite, I am a student at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, and I currently work for the software tech support department at the university. I would like to ask a question about distribution of open office, and what policies you have for it.
I am an openoffice and linux user at home, and have always liked the functionality of openoffice. Here at OIT software, we distribute a CD to students that includes the university's licensed antivirus software, various tools and fixes, service packs for windows users, and firefox. The cd is sold for $3 at our office, and all the contents are available for download through our website. The charge is basically to cover the cost of producing the disc, and really nothing more than that. We often have clients coming in that wish to have their computer formatted, or wish to have instructions on how to go about the process on their own. The trouble is, a lot of students have pirated versions of microsoft office, and if they have legitimate versions, they often don't have the media to reinstall the software once the format is complete. I have always told the clients to consider using openoffice in these cases, yet today I decided to investigate the possibility of including openoffice on our cd that we distribute. It would be easier for our clients, especially those that are retired faculty living off campus and have no access to high speed internet. Is this something that we would need certain agreements for? I know everything is licensed under the lgpl, but I was not sure how this would work out for the large distribution to university students and faculty, as well as the small charge that we apply to the cds we distribute. Any advice on how we could include this software on our cds would be greatly appreciated, as I personally wish to see the community grow, and think that distribution in this manner will help the open office community as well as the UMass community. Thank you very much for your time. Mustapha TalantikiteDepartment of Mathematics and Statistics Office of Information Technology
