One of the side effects of the huge popularity of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a growth in the number of para-sites – sites which look like official OpenOffice.org sites, but actually have nothing to do with the OpenOffice.org project.

This is how it works. A company builds a plausible looking website which could easily be taken for an official OpenOffice.org site. It then pays search engines, so that when people search for e.g. ‘Open Office 3′, its site appears at the top of the search results (as a sponsored link).

Visitors to the site are then lured into making a payment (or worse still, signing up to regular payments) in exchange for a download link, or a promise of an email with a link to a download site.

At best, the gullible customer receives a genuine current copy of OpenOffice.org 3.0 – which they could have downloaded for free from the official OpenOffice.org download site. At worst, they receive nothing, and spend months trying to get a regular payment cancelled from their credit card.

OpenOffice.org is open-source software, so it is quite permissible to sell it, and we do encourage genuine companies to build business models around the software (and we appreciate those that contribute back to the community). However, we know from regular emails and phone calls that there a lot of unhappy customers of these ‘para-sites’. What can we do?

• we can prevent people using our registered trademark, OpenOffice.org
• we can encourage people to report clealry fraudulent sites to consumer protection agencies in their countries

Search engines are well aware this is going on, but are unwilling to do anything about it – even those which claim to be active proponents of open-source.

However, it is worth remembering that every time someone clicks on one of these search engine links, it costs the advertisers money. There are millions of enthusiastic OpenOffice.org users out there – a few clicks each every day would soon drive the para-sites out of business.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.