eBay Sellers Taking Advantage of People

I was checking for something on eBay yesterday and I saw this eBay ad:

open-office-on-sale-at-ebay.png

For those that don’t know, OpenOffice is a suite of software designed to compete with Microsoft Office – the big difference is that it’s FREE. This makes someone selling it on eBay highly dubious. Looking at the note the seller put in the listing, you can tell he’s had problems getting his auctions pulled:

“Note to eBay Staff: We are authorized to distribute this software by the copyright holder under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). A copy of the license has been already presented and can be provided again upon such a request. Please ask us for it before taking action.”

Looking at this guy’s eBay history, you can see the process unfolding. First he bought one of those “make money selling eBooks on eBay” eBooks back in January. I bet he read it and thought “Hmm – I can do run the same scam, only with free software!” Over the next couple of months, he bought an ink cartridge to print on all those printer labels. He bought bubble envelopes to stuff the CDs in. And now he’s selling all sorts of software that’s free to download online, including GIMP (a photo editor), Nvu (an HTML editor), and a PDF maker.

He might not be doing anything illegal, but he’s sure as hell not adding any value to eBay – they should punt this idiot.