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brax
Newbie
Joined: 26 Feb 2007
Posts: 1
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 Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 1:38 pm Post subject: OpenOffice Being Sold For $57 At www-openoffice.com |
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I came across this site today when I googled Open Office:
http://www-openoffice.com/
As you can see they call it 'Open Office' and I assumed since it was $57 it wasn't in fact the free open source Open Office that I love. However upon further investigation I came to the conclusion that this is in fact the free Open Office created by SUN being sold by this site for $57. If you take a look at their video presentation it looks exactly like the FREE open source OpenOffice. I could honestly be wrong and this could be a misunderstanding, however it really looks like this is illegal and somebody should do something about it. |
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Mark B
Super User
Joined: 16 Feb 2007
Posts: 852
Location: Lincolnshire, UK
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Hagar Delest
Super User
Joined: 06 Feb 2006
Posts: 5167
Location: France
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| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:56 am Post subject: |
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It seems they've additional features :
| Quote: | Open Office Features:
Bonus Anti-virus program included *
1 Year Premium Support Included *
Reads and writes PDF files just like Adobe |
So the support may be of some help for few users (but what is the support quality ?)
The 'Reads (...) PDF files just like Adobe' feature is rather strange ; have they developed a viewer module ? or an import filter ?
NB: ClamWin, the anti-virus is of course a free and open source application !
But it doesn't sound very professional. Promising a 100% compatibility with MS Office is a bit optimistic. The 'OpenOffice' name is a trademark, it may be them that had locked it, leading to the OpenOffice.org label for the open version.
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acknak
Moderator
Joined: 13 Aug 2004
Posts: 4295
Location: ~ 40°N,75°W
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| Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:50 am Post subject: |
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Am I paranoid, or is the vast majority of IT-related business is simply not trustworthy? Maybe all business is like this and I'm only familiar with one small part, but it sure seems to be true for software. It's one reason I've come to chuckle when people tout the wonderland of commercial software available for Windows. For every legitimate product, there are a hundred illegitimate knock-offs sold by pirates. Even the legitimate vendors pull all kinds of semi-fraudulent stunts like selling cheap, semi-crippled "home" versions just to get you hooked on their file formats. And even a trustworthy vendor may go out of business, leaving you with a lot of worthless files when the software stops working.
I'm not a "Free Software hippie", but at least when I can choose to download a free, no-strings attached, no hucksters hawking, no adware popping, no virus infecting piece of software, I can be reasonably sure that some creep hasn't dreamed up a new way to scam me. I guess it's only a matter of time before some joker starts distributing a modified OOo, bundled or infected with malware of some kind. And would Sun (or anyone) have the means to stop them? Gee, maybe we should think about starting an "OOoGA" project--it's already got a great name  |
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