Is there a legal problem if....

[Br...@notes.k12.hi.us]

Aloha,

I am a tech support teacher at Nanakuli High & Intermediate School in
Hawaii.  We are located on the leeward coast of the island of Oahu.  I have
a question that I hope you can answer.

We will be receiving a bunch of new MacBook Airs in the next week or so.
One branch of our Dept of Ed will create an image that will use to
configure all of these Macs.  I had requested that Open Office me part of
that image since the suite is free.  Here is the response I received.

"It is free but to the best of my knowledge the GPL3 licensing agreement
has restrictions on the manner in which it needs to be installed. You could
contact the developers and get written clearance then you could your custom
image"

 Although I am a tech support person in the school, I am far from a trained
computer technician, so I am unsure what I need from you so that the image
can include Open Office.  Is there somet documentation you can provide
that will allow us to legally include Open Office in the image?

Thank you,

Brien Nakasone
Technology Support
Nanakuli High & Intermediate School
Office: (808) 668-5823 ext.237
Fax: (808) 668-5828

Re: Is there a legal problem if....

[Rob Weir <ro...@apache.org>]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 6:28 PM,
<Br...@notes.k12.hi.us> wrote:
>
>
> Aloha,
>

Aloha Brien,

> I am a tech support teacher at Nanakuli High & Intermediate School in
> Hawaii.  We are located on the leeward coast of the island of Oahu.  I have
> a question that I hope you can answer.
>
> We will be receiving a bunch of new MacBook Airs in the next week or so.
> One branch of our Dept of Ed will create an image that will use to
> configure all of these Macs.  I had requested that Open Office me part of
> that image since the suite is free.  Here is the response I received.
>
> "It is free but to the best of my knowledge the GPL3 licensing agreement
> has restrictions on the manner in which it needs to be installed. You could
> contact the developers and get written clearance then you could your custom
> image"
>
>  Although I am a tech support person in the school, I am far from a trained
> computer technician, so I am unsure what I need from you so that the image
> can include Open Office.  Is there somet documentation you can provide
> that will allow us to legally include Open Office in the image?
>

Recent versions of OpenOffice, since version 3.4.1 have been under the
Apache License 2.0.  This includes our current version (4.0) as well
as the upcoming 4.0.1 version which we will release next week.

You can find a copy of the Apache License here:

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

The terms for redistribution are described in section 4.   If you are
merely pre-installing Apache OpenOffice, and not modifying the source
code, modifying or removing the files that OpenOffice installs, then
you should be in compliance with the license without any additional
effort.   In particular, the License and NOTICE that section 4
requires are text files that are installed to the OpenOffice directory
when you install the product.

In most cases no additional permission is required beyond the license.
 That is the intent of open source software, that the license
describes the full set of permissions that you (and anyone else) has
to use, modify and redistribute the software.  But if you need
something formal, in terms of letter from us, you can send a note to
our Project Management Committee (PMC) at
private@openoffice.apache.org.

Regards,

Rob Weir, Apache OpenOffice PMC

> Thank you,
>
> Brien Nakasone
> Technology Support
> Nanakuli High & Intermediate School
> Office: (808) 668-5823 ext.237
> Fax: (808) 668-5828

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