Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Major Australian ISP Pulls OpenOffice

Posted by kdawson on from the can't-stand-the-competition dept.

thefickler writes "Australia's largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office. The removal of OpenOffice was brought to TECH.BLORGE's attention by a reader, who complained to Telstra BigPond's support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. The support people were quite open about why OpenOffice was no longer available, i.e. because it was perceived to be competitive with BigPond Office."

3 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Why is this news ? by Alain+Williams · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They want to sell more of their product so they take something else out of the front window.

    They are an ISP, if they blocked their customers from reaching http://www.openoffice.org/ that would be news.

  2. Re:http://www.openoffice.org/ by Broken+Toys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They're an Internet Service Provider (ISP). They're not supposed to decide what you can or cannot download. They're only supposed to provide the means to connect to the Internet and to let you do what you will on the Internet.

  3. Re:Big Pond? by Fex303 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly how big is this ISP
    It's already been answered a bunch of times - they're freakin' huge - but those answers left out one important detail. Telstra, who use the Big Pond (AKA big pwnd) brand for their ISP business, used to be the government monopoly, but have been sold off by the previous government. This has led to all sorts of craziness, since they own all of the infrastructure and have been forced to lease it to competing companies.

    They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).

    They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)