On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 18:45 -0400, Bonnie Martin wrote: > Good evening > > I recently purchased an Open Office 2.1 cd from ebay. > > While trying to download the program, my son discovered that the same > or newer program can be downloaded from the internet for free. > > The ebay member I purchased the cd from is globalcirculations. He has > an ebay store called Grinch Software. Is this legal? The cd I > received is a "homemade" one. Seems unethical. > > > B Martin
Hi Bonnie, Not unethical, quite legitimate. Community Distributors use their bandwidth to download the files, and burn them to disc, then mail them out. All of this takes time and effort. Did you pay $534.00? Because in Commercially equivalent terms this is close to what it should cost. If you paid anything less than this, you got good value for money. But OpenOffice.org is available for free download and most Community Distributors charge a token fee to cover their time and expenses in distributing CDs. As an example of my response to people requesting a CD version, I quote my standard reply: "Here is how it works. Although OOo is free for download, Community Distributors charge a token fee to cover their production expenses. In my case it is $15 for the 2 CD set. Here is a bit of info regarding my particular release. I have a special issue of OpenOffice.org . It normally comes on 2 CDs with versions for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac. I prune the Solaris version and include some excellent Open Source Graphics Software: The Gimp, pixel based image manipulation like Photoshop; Scribus, desktop Publishing like Quark Express; and Inkscape, Vector Graphics like Adobe Illustrator. I also include the latest Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird. Some issues of Tux magazine with great articles on using OOo, a Zip utility and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Price $15.00 for 2 CD set Version 2.3.0 (latest) Payment preferred by EFT (Internet Banking) or by direct deposit at a Westpac Bank after you get the disks. All details are in the package. All I need is your snail mail address and your OK to the price, and I can get them away immediately. Andrew Greig Community Distributor, OpenOffice.org" --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
