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Hi
My name is Claudio Filho and i was the L10N lead and yet am the marketing contact and native language to Brazil and pt-BR of OpenOffice.org project.
Recently, Thiago told with me about the BrOffice.org(Broo) and i asked why haven't the Broo in CentOS. Today, he sent me informations about this list, i read all the thread, and now i will try to reply all questions about this thread.
Just to make some things a little clearer. The name "Open Office" is trademarked in Brazil. The logo, splash and other branding elements are not. The trademark itself is registered in Brazil's Patent and Trademark Office[1] (INPI) and can be checked at their site. Unfortunately there is no direct link... [1]http://www.inpi.gov.br/
Because this problem, the owner of brand/trademark started a juridic campaign to get money of people that are using "OpenOffice*" in Brazil and requesting compensations($$) from developers like the brazilian OOo team and Sun Microsystems. They have *goods* lawyers, and we has luck of to get help with lawyers of Federal Gov for our defense.
The result is that all user (win, mac or linux) that use a program 'OpenOffice*' (can be "Open Office", "OpenOffice" or "OpenOffice.org"), by interpretation of INPI, is breaking the copyrights of owner of the brand. So, by determination of Federal Government, is denied the use of "OpenOffice*", and the official option is BrOffice.org. To protect our devels and users, we created a NGO (with the same name) and registered the brand 'BrOffice.org' saving our necks (and of our users) of juridic problems.
In 2006, i spoke with Rene Engelhard, lead of OOo team in Debian, about our problem and he created a "semi" meta-package[2] of Broo in him distro. Why "semi" meta-pkg? Because this pkg depends of OOo pkgs and have more the files and changes of name and images (splash, about, etc), with ~3.8Mb. [2]http://packages.debian.org/sid/broffice.org
Today, for brazilian users that uses Debian haven't legal problems, and what Thiago (and me) wishes is extend this legal situation to brazilian users of CentOS.
Ah! and the more important is that Broo NOT IS a fork of OOo. Broo is the pt-BR OOo! This question was discussed in the OOo Council and approved, and reflected in our page[3] inside of OOo Project. [3]http://br-pt.openoffice.org/
Best regards Claudio