Although it is entirely legitimate to sell CD's of OpenOffice as a convenience (bandwidth is limited in many parts of the world), users should know that they can always download OpenOffice for free at This sometimes happens on online auction sites.

Websites that try to sell you OpenOffice.

Installers that ask you to send an SMS in order to receive a registration key to use OpenOffice.

Websites offering downloads of OpenOffice but requiring the use of a special 'installer' or 'downloader' application that installs other, unwanted applications before installing OpenOffice.

Other popular open source applications, especially end user ones, run into this problem, e.g., Audacity, 7Zip, etc. This is one of several traps for the unwary on the web today.

When we at the Apache OpenOffice project receive reports like this - and we receive them a couple of times every week - the first thing I ask is, 'Where did you download OpenOffice from?' In today's case, when the user checked his browser's history he found what I suspected, that it was not downloaded from but was a modified version, from another website, that was also installing other applications on his system, programs that in the industry are known as ' adware', ' spyware' or ' malware'. To make things worse, none of these programs could be uninstalled via normal means. We received an email from a very frustrated user, complaining that OpenOffice had taken over his browser, installed new toolbars, replaced the browser's home page, was causing pop-ups to surface on every page, etc.

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