Linux Journal On Linux's Adoption In U.S. Courts

Sam Hiser writes "Tom Adelstein writes in Linux Journal that, technically, one-third of the U.S. Government has moved to Linux: its Third Branch, the Judiciary. That's 30,000 users across 800 locations, comprising the nation's Federal court system. Given our information overload, it's easy to miss the most significant kernels of news."

Comments

Wow!

[neiras]

Now let's see the US government follow in Germany's footsteps and directly sponsor the development of some critical piece of open-source software.

Re:Wow!

[presarioD]

Why do you want open source to die?

Seriously now, this is kind of scary. If Open Source ever "dominates" in the governmental sector, the impact it will have on the Open Source community will not be a trivial matter to consider.

The worst thing that happend to socialism for example is that they actually got elected for government.

New forces will be created in the Open Source community once it becomes mainstream and the temptation to "bend" GPL for more and more profit might be there. Of course you might argue that this will automatically exclude anybody that does it from the Open Source community but I am just wondering how the future might look 40 years from now...

Liability

[hawkeyeMI]

They must not be too worried about the SCO case, eh?

Woo hoo

[adam.skinner]

So our judicial system is moving from Solaris to Linux for their servers. This would have been a story of note had they put Linux on the desktop, but as it stands it hardly seems newsworthy. I mean, the multinational company I work for uses Linux on many of it's servers as well.

Adoption of Linux as a server is one thing; adoption of Linux on the desktop for 30K is quite another...

Check the math there, chester.

[chumpieboy]

One third?

One of three branches, yes.

Those 30,000 users are a drop in the bucket when compared to the total number of Federal employees and offices.

Will the slashdot readers be hypocrites or will they denounce FUD when it comes from Linux Journal? If Microsoft (or a journal that is focused on MS technology) had released a statement that "two-thirds of the US government runs MS software!" then there would be a huge shitstorm.

I like this...

[Richthofen80]

because paying ZERO dollars for software means my government isn't spending any money when it doesn't have to, which means that I can keep more of my money instead of it going to taxes, right?

right?

(crickets chirping....)

What a load of crap.

[Keebler71]

technically, one-third of the US Government has moved to Linux:

Uh, no.... technically one of the three branches of governement has moved to Linux. That is a far cry from the misleading assertion that "one-third" of the government has moved to linux.

Of course, I can't find this quote anywhere in the actual article, so it must have been the "analysis" of the submitter. Isn't this the type of misleading claim we continuously beride MS for?

One can only hope not

[ScouseMouse]

From a purely impartial point of view, I certainly hope they dont let the use of underlying systems influence their decisions.

The judicirary is supposed to be impartial. I think for the most part it is. I would like it to stay like that no matter whatever happens.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Now SCO owns the Judicial System..... what next, the Senate? ;)

I know you're being funny, but let me draw attentions to a significant detail: if courts grok Linux it will be far more difficult for "people" like Dearl to initiate such "operations" like the one we witness.

Re:Gov't adoption is the good news

[Vengeance]

Unfortunately, the only reason that a lot of money flows from government coffers into industry, is that these very same dollars have been extracted from some other industry, or directly from our pockets.

Never make the mistake of believing that our government has any money to spend. It has only your money and mine, and it's not asking for permission nearly often enough.

Re:Strange

[Teun]

Assuming you are from the USofA you *do* get to vote for them.
OK, it might by indirect but it's *your* vote for Congress and The President that eventually get's you the Supreme Court's judges.

So next time get registered, go voting and stop moaning!

WordPerfect

[justanyone]

It's a widely recognized fact that most of the legal community (law firms, etc.) used to use WordPerfect. I'm unsure of the current situation given WP's decline in popularity due to domination by MSOffice.

However, if whoever owns WordPerfect now (Corel? Novell? Underpants Gnomes?) would re-issue it on Linux, and provide favorable licensing to allow it to run from the server to the desktop nicely, many legal offices and courts that currently use WordPerfect could move to Linux far easier than to MSOffice. It would be a change of OS and NOT a change of application.

Any lawyers out there that can comment on what software (especially larger) legal firms are using, and on what platforms, and for what reasons?

I would wager that another large tipping-point factor would be how Lexus and Nexus are used. If they operate via a web portal instead of a fat client (Lawyers? Paralegals? Anyone know?) then making sure they operate nicely on Linux is a key adoption factor. IBM, are you listening? Law firms might like a suite of applications specially tailored to their needs, and they don't mind paying for high functionality if it gets them ease of use (not being typically technofiles).

Also, billing software, the back-office function of legal offices, might benefit from some kind of scheduling application that keeps track of which case someone's researching and thus bills time to that case in an easy manner.

An ex-lawyer friend of mine (now works as NOC designer for Siemens) mentioned what a pain in the butt it was to itemize his timesheet (bill) for 10 minute segments of his time, espeically if he was making lots of calls. Make a better application and they will love you (again, IBM or Novell, you have options here... and not only for US court systems).

-- Kevin J. Rice