BrOffice.org in Fedora 10

[Igor Pires Soares]

Em Seg, 2008-08-11 às 21:14 -0800, Jeff Spaleta escreveu:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Igor Pires Soares <igorsoares at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This is one of my concerns. I'm creating a BrOffice.org LiveCD spin
> > which is waiting approval from the spin SIG. It could fit the case, but
> > we will still have the same problem with the official DVD Installation
> > Media.
> 
> 
> Let me state it a little more firmly... we need to know what the
> actual legal bar to meet is. If having openoffice.org available at
> install time..for anyone in Brazil is a problem..then we'll have to
> stop distributing the normal dvd in Brazil... it very well may turn
> out that nothing short of that will suffice.
> 
> If the language specific hacks to hide OpenOffice.org for just pt_BR
> users at install time do not meet the legal requirement...then we
> shouldn't waste time with the hacks in comps. It doesn't matter if it
> seems reasonable to me or to you  to do language specific changes
> because it will work for  "most" people..the trademark law which you
> are trying to work around may not see it as reasonable and that is
> what matters. Having a technical solution which works for the vast
> majority of the people in Brazil...may not be enough. We may need to
> find a solution which is guaranteed to meet the legal requirement no
> matter how a user in Brazil interacts with the install media.
> 
> What does the law in Brazil need us to do?  We must have an
> understanding as to what the actual legal bar to meet is and put
> resources in place to meet that requirement.  If that means a special
> Brazilian install media..which doesn't include openoffice.org branded
> binaries at all..then we need to know so we can deal with that. and
> not pretend otherwise.

IANAL but AFAIK the problem is related to logos, trademarks, icons...
specially artwork stuff. The name of the package itself is not a problem
here because is just a written text as everything else. Besides that,
the brand stuff are in broffice.org packages. Looking at the structure
of OpenOffice.org packages list in Rawhide we can see "openoffice.org"
written many times, but there is no trademark advice or something like
that. But if you open OpenOffice.org and go to the about dialog you will
see a copyright warning. In my opinion this is where the problem lives
and this what we are trying to avoid here.

Of course we can't forbid users from downloading OpenOffice.org packages
from our repositories or OpenOffice.org website, but this is not a
default behavior led by Fedora, it is user demanded.

Apart legal issues, the BrOffice.org brand is very important here
because is why users recognize the application and the NGO. End users
don't see or understand the different between BOo and OOo, and probably
they don't care.

I'm sorry to bother you guys with this country specific issue but if
they had to rename OpenOffice.org in Brazil is because it was their last
option. Maybe there is no easy solution for Fedora either.

The legal discussion at BrOffice.org website is in Portuguese, which
didn't help anyway. I will contact someone from BrOffice.org NGO and try
to come up with some English material about this issue.

Kind regards,
Igor Pires Soares