Distributing binary builds of vendor's LTS branches

["Ming H." <2097632994@xxxxxx>]

Dear LibreOffice developers,

I am writing on behalf of a group of Chinese LO users [1].  We are thinking of
providing extended builds of old releases for which TDF has stopped making
security updates, since many Chinese Windows users opt to stay at old releases
for various reasons and are mostly unaware of the security consequences.

As we have limited manpower and experiences, we don't want to maintain a
branch of our own yet, but plan to start with building a commercial vendor's
long-term support branch available in the official git repository.  We'll of
course remove the vendor's branding and make it clear that such builds come
from us instead of the vendor.

My question is, is such a plan acceptable by the LO community in general, and
the developers from those commercial vendors in particular?  My understanding
is that such builds don't violate the MPL LO is distributed under, and it
would potentially help catching bugs and improve visibility for the vendor's
LTS product, and I hope it wouldn't be met with strong disapproval.

Comments and advice are appreciated.  And if the developer mailing list is not
the proper place for such inquiry, please redirect me to the correct channels.

Sincerely yours,
Ming

1. We have a community website at https://www.libreofficechina.org/