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U.S. Justice Dept. Chooses Corel over Microsoft
peg0cjs writes "The Justice Department, which challenged Microsoft Corp. in courtrooms for nearly a decade over antitrust violations, will pay more than $2 million each year to buy business software from Corel Corp, according to this article from CANOE. 'The Justice Department will make WordPerfect software available to more than 20 organizations inside the agency, but not the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration, which use Microsoft's Office business software exclusively, said Mary Aileen O'Donovan, a program manager in the Justice Management Division.' According to the article, the deal is worth up to $13.2 million over five years for Ontario-based Corel. Has sanity finally set in, or is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?"
1. Because when this eval and bid process was started, OOo was not really a viable alternative.
2. Support contract.
3. Being able to pay a single source for training materials.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?c ourt=7th&navby=case&no=991754A
You have not been keeping up with the news. Microsoft sold all their Corel shares a few years ago (which, by the way, were a special non-voting kind so they had no say in how Corel ran their business). Now Corel is 100% private, owned by San Francisco venture capitalists Vector Capital.
Nope, MS sold their shares a few years ago. Corel is private now, owned by Vector Capital of san francisco.
Note MS's Corel shares were a special non-voting kind, which means they had no say in Corel's decision to exit the linux business.
No sanity there...
I can't find the reference right away, but I remember reading last year that MS bought a rather large part of Corel, which subsequently dropped their Linux distro a few months later...
If it is so, isn't this ruling a win-win for MS?
MS owned some non-voting stock in Corel back when it was a public company. Not any longer.
What is means is that legal documents need to in specific formats to be considered valid. Word Perfect gives you complete control over the format of the document and the elements. Word does not.
By the way, the format issue is so important it is one of the reasons why faxing legal documents is OK, but sending them electronically is not (the local printer may reformat the document while in electronic format).
XP SP2 already does harmfully affect WordPerfect Suite. You can read more about it at microsoft.com.
While the "excellence" is debatable, the fact that .doc is a standard isn't.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
No, it doesn't. There is a distinct difference between something being standard, which is what you looked up, and The Standard, which is what you said.
That's not true: Federal Courts I know of require PDF.
My wife works for a Federal Appeals court; they use WordPerfect internally but require PDF filings.
Some clients are law firms; all their court filings are in PDF.
The poster he responded to said:
You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.
So he proceeded to define it. "STANDARD" doesn't mean "standards group".
In any case, MS word is THE STANDARD word processing format across the world. De facto. There is no de jure standard. So it is The Standard. It sucks, you can hate it, but it's reality. Perhaps some day enough people will want to change that. Apparently not today.
-Stu
Alt-F3 brings up reveal codes in WordPerfect, something that Word doesn't have.