OpenOffice995: It looks like the guys over at Software 995 (we’ve talked about them before) are re-packaging Open Office and selling support for it as “Open Office 995.” For $19.95 you get email tech support with a 24-hour respond time.
This, of course, being the only way you can make money “selling” open-source software. Don’t sell it, just sell support and add-ons.
Convert PDF, HTML, DOC, TIFF and more: So, your office needs to produce simple PDFs, but you don't want to pay $450 for a retail copy of Acrobat? First, of all, don't pay it because their are a number of alternatives like RoboPDF that are so much cheaper. …
Until you pay, you get ads too. Must be great - clicking on the toolbar in "write" takes you to a sponsor's website?
Strikes me that they're taking advantage of ignorance there, in the hopes that people haven't heard of the actual, ad-free Open Office.
They made some changes to the open office, like red hat does with linux, but it is not the same, I think people know about the ad-free open office, ignorant people still uses Microsoft Office, because they think it is the only one in the world.
It seems that most, or all, of what Software995 have to offer is just rebranded free and open source software. For example, clippad995 is an older and less updated version of Ditto ( http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/ ) and ftp995 is a version of FileZilla ( http://filezilla-project.org/ ). Hmm, an old version with ads or an updated, truly free version? I know what I would choose.