How to Get OpenOffice.org

South and Southern Africa presents some rather interesting and specific issues regarding the distribution of OpenOffice.org, primarily related to communications infrastructure.

As the full download of the standard version of OpenOffice.org lies in the region of 65Mb to 80Mb, those few people who have an Internet connection, let alone a reliable telephone line, are unable to even attempt a download.

In order to attempt to resolve this problem, the Southern African Marketing Project has developed a tiered distribution programme with a focus on community distribution.

OpenOffice.org Distributors

There a four basic classes of OpenOffice.org distributors. Each class, we believe, plays a crucial role in making OpenOffice.org as universally available in South and Southern Africa as possible.

Community

The community distributor assists people in obtaining OpenOffice.org on a non-commercial basis. They offer OpenOffice.org on a non-profit basis such as by CD-ROM swap (you give them a blank CD-R, they'll give you an OpenOffice.org CD-ROM) or on a cost basis (you only pay them for the cost of the CD-ROM and any postage).

All community distributors are volunteers, thereby making their efforts in this regards a sacrifice of their time and resources. Please be considerate and try an alternative distributor if one of these distributors is unable to assist you promptly.

Unfortunately, this distributor programme is fairly demanding in terms of resources, specifically when it comes to ensuring that the community distributors have the latest version of OpenOffice.org. If you are willing and able to provide support through the provision of CD-ROM media or the subsidisation of our postage costs, please contact us at [email protected].

Commercial

Commercial distributors offer OpenOffice.org for sale, normally on CD-ROM. These distributors often add value to the product by including additional software, literature or services.

O E M

The OEM distributor provides OpenOffice.org either pre-installed on a new computer and/or include an OpenOffice.org CD-ROM with such a purchase.

V A R

As the OpenOffice.org Licence allows others to make modifications to the product, several organisations make changes and offer additional components not provided by the OpenOffice.org project. Such organisations often rename the product and sell it as their own. There are numerous products available which are based on OpenOffice.org including Sun's StarOffice, but it is not the function of this site to market their products, so no further details are provided on this site.

Distributor Application

If you are interested in listing yourself or your company / organisation as a distributor on this site, please select the Distributor Application tab at the top of the page.