Copying OpenOffice.org by Libraries, Organizations or Tech. Support groups

In short, you may copy OpenOffice.org for anyone.

Libraries may have a reference copy for people to borrow or copy.
- Some libraries make a new CD for a small charge.
NGOs or corporations may keep a copy in a corporate library for employees to copy and use at work and at home.
Tech support groups may keep a reference copy or distribute copies.

The most important thing about such casual distribution (as opposed to full distributorship organziations, see the Distribution Home page for more information) is to join the New Release Mailing List to be certain that you are not handing our obsolete copies

Please subscribe to the "announce" mailing list from the mailing list page at http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html#general

Integrity of copies:

Almost as important is to be able to assure people of the integrity of the copy you are handing out.

There are several ways to do this:

Keep a master copy and only loan out copies of the master copy. Every time it is returned do a compare of the files one to the other.
Collect the signatures¹ of all files to use to compare against the copy when it was loaned out.
Perhaps easiest is to never use loan and return. Insteadmake a copy and hand it out every time someone wants one.

Obtaining a master copy:

The easiest way to get a new Master Copy is to order a new master from one of out distributors and use that CD as a master copy. A new CD should cost, including delivery, one a few Punts, Euros, Rubles or dollars.
You may join our official distribution channel and the use the ISO distribution kit. More information is available on the main distribution page.

In any case,

Please see the general information about good burns of OpenOffice.org,
Be sure that instructions for "How to Install" are included, or a pointer to a web install page is both obvious and included.
Put appropriate labels on the CD and for jewel boxes so people know what the disk is, including at least:

OpenOffice.org Office Suite, Release 1.1.1

Read the file named default.html in the top or root directory.

See http://www.openoffice.org for more information or direct downloads.

You may copy this CD: see http://distribution.openoffice.org for details.

Always anti-virus scan all new software.

Replace the italicized version with the current version.

Join the OpenOffice New Release Mailing List so that you will not be distributing old versions.

Signatures for integrity checking.

For more information about sgnatures please use a search engine such as Google and search for information about MD5 or SHA-1.

To integrity check a CD that is from a distributor or returned by a user all one has to do is create signatures for all the files on the CD and compare them to a signature list obtained directly from OpenOffice.org. .

If there are any changes or new files, the CD should not be used until they are fully explained.

There are free or inexpensive utilities for signature checking on all major computer platforms such as Linux, Mac, Solaris, UNIX or Windows

If you do not check signatures on CDs as they are returned from borrowers, we recommend that you do not accept back CDs. CDRs are very inexpensive compared to the many costs you will incur if someone loads a virus or worm on a CD that you loan out.