On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 8:57 PM, Michael Halsall <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi there, I would just like to let you know that there are quite a lot of > people who are selling openoffice.org on ebay and I hope you can report this > to ebay and stop it as I understand your software is supposed to be free. >
I understand the frustration. But if you look at the license for legacy versions of OpenOffice.org, which is the LGPL, you see that it includes the GPL license, where this is allowed: "4. Conveying Verbatim Copies. You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program. You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee." See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html Newer versions of OpenOffice at Apache, starting with 3.4, will have a different license (Apache 2.0), but selling copies of Apache software is also not forbidden by the license. I would be personally upset if someone was able to charge far more than a reasonable cost for advertising and distribution of a CD containing OpenOffice, but I don't think that is the job of the license to prevent. Competition in eBay will tend to keep the price down. If anyone can sell OpenOffice for whatever price they want, then the price will tend to gravitate to some minimum value. However, there are two abuses that we should watch for: 1) Anyone who distributes modified versions of OpenOffice that contain malware, adware, If we know about these, we have some ability to stop it. For example, we can prevent them from using the trademarked name "OpenOffice" or the OpenOffice logo. 2) Also, if anyone masquerades as the project, for example, by picking an eBay user name that would confuse the user into thinking they were dealing officially with the project, then we would have some options. Regards, -Rob > Click here to see what I mean, alternatively just go to ebay and search for > open office. > > http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=open+office&_sacat=See-All-Categories > <http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=open+office&_sacat=See-All-Categories> > > > Kind regards, > > Michael
