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OpenOffice CDs live for lending in Scottish libraries (Register)

[Posted December 18, 2003 by ris]

The Register reports that OpenOffice CDs are becoming available for lending public libraries throughout the UK. ""Librarians love this stuff," says Kerr. "Most don't know what it is or what they can do with it. They need a trusted source of CDs and cannot accept them from members of the public. It may be more cost efficient if they had a Kiosk that is not connected to the internet but could create CDs from images rather than CDs on shelves (they have photocopiers). A CD like the Gutenberg project, TheOpenCD is of more value to them than Linux distributions."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Dec 18, 2003 19:39 UTC (Thu) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

Are there still Gutenberg Project CD's for sale from any vendor nowadays? I would like to get some updated ones.

OpenOffice CDs live for lending in Scottish libraries (Register)

Posted Dec 19, 2003 8:57 UTC (Fri) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link]

The LWN summary condensed the content too much for me to get
the point. After reading the article, I got it:

Librarians always need to deal with copyright issues and this
is especially difficult when it comes to software. FLOSS makes
their lives easier. However, before they make software available
for copying they have to be sure that the software on the CD
really is free, and thus they have to acquire it from a trusted
source.

OpenOffice CDs live for lending in Scottish libraries (Register)

Posted Dec 19, 2003 9:22 UTC (Fri) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link]

I don't get the point here. Where does the "kiosk" get the images from if not from the 'Net? Why do they trust source A rather than source B?

If what it takes is an "official" distribution in a cardboard box containing a printed licence and a master CD which can be snail-mailed to libraries from an "official office", then I'm sure that the bigger projects like OOo would find it worthwhile to do that. The unit cost would be small, and the libraries would very probably feel much more cosy if they did have to pay the cost of production & postage. Which is most definitely legal even under GPL.

Producing copies of CDs to give away (or sell at production cost) to "customers" (can't really call them borrowers!) is of course trivial given a typical office or consumer PC with a CD writer drive. Doesn't even matter if the PC used to "stamp out copies" is running a completely different OS to that required to run the software.