Documents Pro - Write & Edit on Mac AppStore

Board Discuss
#1

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to draw the Board's attention to the existence of the products

"Documents Pro - Write & Edit"

and

"Office PDF Suite - for Word, Spreadsheet, Slides & Adobe PDF Docs Editor"

These products are being sold respectively for 14,99 € and 39,99 € on the AppStore, which in and of itself is not a surprise.

More surprising to me is that the products look like LibreOffice from the screenshots that are available (or maybe OpenOffice.org, I haven't done a detailed comparison as I don't have OOo anymore).

Again, this wouldn't be a great surprise per se.

However, nowhere do I see any recognition in the AppStore blurb about the product being derived from, or produced with, LibreOffice (or OpenOffice.org) code, nor any mention of a licence, opensource or otherwise.

There is a copyright mention, but it glibly states "(C) Word Documents Processor"

The only reason I found the product in the first place is because I put the keyword "ODF" in the AppStore search filter and this was one of the results.

Does anyone have any further information about who is behind these products, and if so, why they are failing to recognize the contribution of the FOSS community behind it, the licence(s) under which it is distributed, and  seemingly, a link pointing to the availability of the source code ?

Is the Board going to do anything about it, and if so, what ?

Alex

#2

Hmm, trawling the App Store shows that there are other similar looking products that also do not reference the underlying FOSS source, code, or licences.

For example (with search string "libre office" :

Ace Office:for word processing (Cynoble Technology Limited) - in app purchases

GO Office 2021 (Xiaoqin Chen / HNBSoft Team) - 9,99 €

DOC Mate:for MS Office (Cynoble Technology Limited)

Alex

#3

Hi Alex,

we have been looking at the issue in general both in terms of use of "LibreOffice" and the promotion of LibreOffice based apps without links to the relevant licence and source code.

We have already issued take down notices in the past so we will keep the situation monitored and act accordingly.

Please feel free to forward to me links to other examples so that we can complete our list of action items.

Ciao

Paolo

#4

Thanks Paolo, will do.

Best,

Alex

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