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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?"
A blip? I dunno, seems when the Roman Empire began to crumble it started somewhere, in some little way. Don't discount Corel too quickly and don't underestimate the power of saving a few dollars by a goverment sorely in need of cost cutting. If these tools work well, the next round may embrace FBI and DEA. you have the right to alternative sources of software
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Even though I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan, I find something slightly disturbing about my government sending my tax dollars out of country with a software contract award. Why not Open Office?
As a former corel employee !2001 they had posters all over HQ talking about how the DOJ and Microsofts Own lawyers in the antitrust thing used WPO, as WP docs are pretty much the standard de jure ;)
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly
Until recently (the last 3 or so years), the legal profession had widely used only WordPerfect, making it a standard within the community. Even now, there's a significantly larger percentage of legal professionals who use WordPerfect than there is in other professions / industries.
If one department of the federal government were to drop Word for WordPerfect, it would be the Justice Department.
One interesting story. I work for an economic consulting firm, and we were working for Microsoft (don't kill me--I didn't have a choice!) on one of their class-action lawsuits that came about in the wake of the antitrust conviction. We were of course forced to use Word, and as we all know, one thing MS has *never* gotten right is their footnotes. Our deadline was less than 6 hours away for a major report, and all of the footnotes were FUBARed. The head lawyer called the guy at MS who was in charge of Office (I forget his name) and yelled, "Why can't you guys fix the fucking footnotes! Word Perfect has like three developers and they can get it right!" The MS guy hemmed and hawed, said they were working on it. That was 3-4 years ago, and MS still hasn't gotten the footnotes right.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
the standard in legal documents for many years.
I've worked in legal forums on a few occasions (remember Marylin Hall Patel of the Napster ruling?), and the judges/lawyers I've met are insistent on all documents being created/filed in WordPerfect.
This is news??
DOJ has been using Corel Wordperfect Office exclusively for a decade, and good ol' dos wordperfect 5.1 since there was a wordperfect. I personally have loaded 1980's era wordperfect documents off the network to cut'n'paste into a brief.
Nothing new here.
I was working for attorneys when they were making the switch from WordStar to WordPerfect, and then to WordPerfect 5. WordPerfect was (for the time) an absolute pleasure to use, although you really needed that little template sheet placed over the top of your function keys.
WordPerfect was so cool that I used its macro functionality to build a bill-production application for one bankruptcy attorney for whom I once worked. The bills submitted to the judge at the end of the bankruptcy proceeding were forced to conform to a certain style; I created this little "app" so that the secretaries could just do data-entry from the attorneys' hand-written billing notes and automagically out of the HP LaserJet II and III would pop a court-approved billing form. This was part of a whole suite of apps I started doing this way to produce ready-made pleadings and whatnot; great way to save on letterhead for some of the smaller attorneys I knew in the San Jose area.
5 years later I checked back in with that bankruptcy attorney and his office was still using the app!
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Obvious, but ... So $ is saved by installing OSS and thus avoiding licenses. Then, the next year the budget is cut that amount. But again, with no licenses to pay, the cut $ isn't missed.
The only obvious downside is if the office wants to backpedal and repurchase licenses for non-OSS. Seems in such an outcome, the higher ups / accounting types would approve the reincrease of the budget as it is better to have a working department than one that can't due to inappropriate software. But if money can be saved, it seems worth the try.
Seems to me it is likely a rut mentality. Funny, I was listening to a radio program today. NPR maybe. A guy bought a farm, in NY I think, in an area where farmers have been having time staying solvent. He planted lots of crops and let chickens roam them eating the bugs, thus saving on the pesticide bills. The local farmers all watched this closely and saw his success. After the year, he gave (yes gave) the farm back to the original owner. His complaint was that none of the farmers implemented his program. He argued it was because while you can show a person a better way, you can't force their mind open.