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?"

Comments

Alt-F3 Tells All

[ackthpt]

Obviously the Department of Justice (not the Justice Department, which sounds like some government agency in charge of people flying around in their underwear) wants to get to the root of problems more quickly and with Alt-F3 they can find the clues much faster!

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

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[lukewarmfusion]

Superuser tip: If you're using Microsoft Office, hit Alt-F4 to improve interface.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[ackthpt]

Regarding why no OpenOffice - well, I guess the OpenOffice lobbiests just didn't know as nice restaraunts to take the decision makers.

"What do you got against Taco Bell?"

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[ScrewMaster]

More likely they're still pissed at Microsoft and look at this as a good way to thumb their collective noses at Bill Gates.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Recovery1]

No, I bet a more likely reason they went and bought from Corel instead of going with OpenOffice is so they can justify their spending budgets. In our government I have been told if you department doesn't spend their full budget you get that much less next year. That's why governments go hog crazy on spending in Febuary just before income tax time.

Go with OpenOffice? but that would make us short our spending budget? Are you mad? You're fired..

Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems a more plausable reason in my mind anyway.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[ackthpt]

More likely they're still pissed at Microsoft and look at this as a good way to thumb their collective noses at Bill Gates.

Not really a wise decision to state such. As the federal government has to go through an objective bidding process for procurement, Microsoft could appeal, charging these people as being biased and rigging the bidding.

If you're in a public agency, involved with purchasing, you learn pretty fast to keep your yap shut on your own favoring/disfavoring opinions, because it's embarrassing to the head of the organization when a challenge is issued and it's found your people shot their mouths off after stearing the bidding.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Darth Hubris]

StarOffice 7.0 anyone? Same as OpenOffice.org last time I checked. They can spend their money, or spend half of it on cheap liquor and expensive whores, and the rest on free downloaed of OOo.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[rikkards]

Nice to hear but not really surprising. Law firms have always been the staunch bastions of hope for alternatives to MS Office due to the control that you get with Wordperfect.

Why wouldn't the DOJ want to do it as well.

Funny story, I did some IT work for these guys http://www.mbm.com/ who are an IP law firm in Canada and they were the worst for pirating software. I think they had licenses for some COTS workstations that one of the previous IT admins had purchased but they had gone with beige boxes and had installed the same licensed copy (not MS Select) on the remainder of their workstations (about 60 or 70). They had also an Access based application (PAATSY or something like that) which had been licensed for a bunch of users but everyone in the company used it. To allow more people to use it they copied the database several times and if a user needed read access they would open a copy instead.

I don't think they had bought enough CALS for their Exchange box either and had only 1 licensed copy of Wordperfect.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Fareq]

Why no open-office?

Mostly because OO.o sucks ass.

No, this isn't really meant as flamebait. Just an expression of my opinion.

I use both products a great deal.

I am running Microsoft Office 2003 on my laptop, and OpenOffice.org 1.1 on my Linux desktop.

I went to great pains to get permission to plug my laptop into the office network so that I could do the simple things (like filling out my time sheet spreadsheet) and bigger things (like creating design docs or proposals for new projects) in MS Office on my laptop instead of having to slug it out with OO.o.

I can't point to a specific thing and say "this is why I don't like OO.o" It just seems an exceptionally poor product. Very sub-par. The interface is not as clean, its less intuitive, it does what I expect less often, and its less easy to configure (or, perhaps, I just memorized the Microsoft Office stuff and not the OO.o yet).

I still end up using both every day, and I know which one I prefer. I even prefer it enough that I went out and *gasp* bought a copy of MS Office to install on my Windows desktop after trying OO.o for windows for a week or so.

Also, OO.o Writer doesn't do MS Word .doc compatibility quite right yet. Which is annoying, as MS Word .doc is the standard format. I know its hard (especially as the format undoubtedly changes with every new version)

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[tepples]

Which is annoying, as MS Word .doc is the standard format.

ISO what? IEEE what? ECMA what? You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Recovery1]

Never thought of that one, and the StarOffice is a good idea too which I missed as well.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Fareq]

From Merriam-Webster: something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example

Also From M-W: regularly and widely used, available, or supplied

From Dictionary.com: Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence.

I do not see reference to IEEE, ISO, ECMA, or any other "standards body" in these definitions. Sure, there are definitions of the word "standard" that reference such things, but then:

From M-W: a long narrow tapering flag that is personal to an individual or corporation and bears heraldic devices

So clearly my usage need not fit all alternate meanings, just the one I want. In other words, if you are going to be a grammar nazi, be right. Or, rather, it actually does mean what I think it means.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[AstroDrabb]

Microsoft could appeal, charging these people as being biased and rigging the bidding

Do you really think that charge would stand? Did you RTFA? MS wanted $150(US) per copy of their office suite while Corel wanted $40(US) per copy. Do the math. Any court would laugh MS out based on those numbers. Clearly someone with some _balls_ said WordPerfect is "good enough" and "does what we need" and cost considerably less, so why should we (the U.S. Justice Dept.) pay the MS "tax"?

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[rikkards]

I mulled about snitching on them but I had heard that they had treated their IT staff like crap and had heard horror stories about how their other staff was treated but figured that karma is a bitch and someday something would happen. Plus I moved on. This was a year or two back so things could be different by now.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Anonymous Coward]

In our government I have been told if you department doesn't spend their full budget you get that much less next year.

Which is an myth, pure and simple, propagated by conservatives to spread the gospel of Government inefficiency. Ever heard of a not-so-little thing called the GAO?

That's why governments go hog crazy on spending in Febuary just before income tax time.

And the more detailed the nonsense is, the more easy it is to debunk; the federal fiscal year starts in October.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that doesn't just happen in the government IT places. At the fortuen 500 where I work, if you go "over budget" you were not a very good manager at planning. If you go "under budget", you get a pat-on-the-back and your next years budget is cut, since you didn't need as much money as you were given.

I am _sooo_ glad I am a programmer and not a business guy that needs to deal with such crap politics.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Paradise Pete]

Or, rather, it actually does mean what I think it means.

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.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[BobPaul]

Regarding why no OpenOffice - well, I guess the OpenOffice lobbiests just didn't know as nice restaraunts to take the decision makers.

I think it's probably more likely that with WordPerfect, there's a company they can throw money at and receive support. I think this is most likely one of the unfortunate cases where OpenSource is sluffed aside because of perceived insecurities.

I've used both OpenOffice and WordPerfect on my home machine, I can say without any lie that OpenOffice (esp 2.0beta) is much easier to work with and much friendlier with other file formats than WordPerfect is...

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Red Alastor]

It's true in Canada at least. My father works for CBC (the national TV station) and when his manager reach the end of his fiscal year, they all get new work clothes (steel cap boots and stuff) and new furnitures because they have nothing else to spend their budget on.

A few years ago, he got a PDA.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[bsharitt]

I keep trying that, but Office crashes every time I do. Do I have to enable superuser mode first?

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[bsharitt]

OpenOffice probably wasn't considered as a real option, but StarOffice may have been.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Bedouin X]

Oh my god that was classic.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[mdwstmusik]

Ever heard of a not-so-little thing called the GAO?

Ever heard of a not-so-little thing called reality?
I recently got hired as a Systems Admin for a state government office. Despite the fact that the state is deeply in debt, the biggest objection that I've received when suggesting OSS has been "If we reduce our licensing costs, they'll cut our budget for next year!?"

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Curtman]

MS wanted $150(US) per copy of their office suite while Corel wanted $40(US) per copy. Do the math.

And OpenOffice.org wants $0. I already did the math. Is there anything Corel does that OOo doesn't?

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Baricom]

A lot of people say that companies and government "want somebody to sue." I don't know what their reasoning is.

However, I'm curious if Sun submitted a bid to provide StarOffice. The costs go as low as $25 a seat for government, according to their site.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[bonch]

Something doesn't need a standards body to become a standard.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[nbritton]

My gut is telling me there only doing this to negotiate a better contract with Microsoft. Why do I think this? Because I have an uncle that works in the Antitrust Division of the DOJ and when they where trying Microsoft back in 2001(ish?) they where doing a site-wide (all DOJ divisions and departments), roll out of Microsoft windows 2000. Why do I know that? Because when he came out here on his vacation he had to take mandatory training classes, Win2k admin / deployment boot camp type deal, and I asked him why he was taking them.

The connection between the Microsoft trial and the windows 2000 roll out is just speculation on my part though.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[salesgeek]

Not to rain on the parade, but I don't think OOo has the legal features that have been a staple of WP since version 4.2.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[QuietLagoon]

You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.

There is the sense of industry standard which means little more than widely used. Then there is standard which should have some manner of ISO, ECMA or IEEE, etc. moniker. Up until the time that Open Source software started to hit the radar screens of the mainstream IT trade press, Microsoft software was commonly referred to as Microsoft's industry standard software. One of the many improvements that Open Source brought to the scene is that the IT trade press began to refer to Microsoft's software more correctly as proprietary software instead of the industry standard.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[CrazyWingman]

While this is definitely true with government budgets (spend them or lose them next year), there's a very simple reason they went with Corel: They already had it. Read the article a bit closer - Corel offered them $40/copy for _upgrades_.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[henrygb]

When you are flying in your NASA rocket, remember that each part was purchased by competitive tender and the cheapest bid won.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[4of12]

Which is an myth, pure and simple, propagated by conservatives to spread the gospel of Government inefficiency.

Not a myth. There is a constant downward pressure to reduce budgets in government, so if you don't spend what was given to you at the beginning of the fiscal year, then the conclusions is that you didn't really need the money and won't need that much next year either.

Conservative myths rely upon mythological figures such as the Welfare Queen, Ridiculous Red Tape Wrapper or Scientific Study of Pig Sex.

One or two anecdotes of each of which will go a long way to cutting social welfare benefits to a larger number of honestly disabled beneficiaries or to cutting "burdensome regulation" on an industry that would prefer to externalize the costs of exploiting a public resource or to cutting scientific research budgets so that we can comfortably wallow in our self-satisfied superiority of ignorance.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[BigDogCH]

Okay, I got the alt-f4 joke. That was funny. But what does alt-f3 do (or what is that about)? I am totally lost here. I know it isn't correct for /. posts to ever admit defeat, but I lose.

So I am not off-topic... I would like to point out that I have family in decently high ranking government positions, who refer to .doc as the "Standard". Also, they all feel that schools should use MS Office, since it is "the standard in the real world". Sad really. This is mostly the Army and National Guard. Also, these are people with influence over which programs are used for everyone. They also set which formats should be allowed for purposes such as archiving, applying for jobs, sending memos, and more..... Everytime I suggest a change, they invade my helpless living room with masses of troops who should probably be home with their families.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Feztaa]

That's the glory of capitalism. You're riding in the most cost-efficient, most highly technologically advanced rocket they could build!

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[AstroDrabb]

I agree with you 100%, sadly I didn't get to make the decision for the US Justice Dept. If I did, I would have gone with OOorg.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[japhmi]

Clearly someone with some _balls_ said WordPerfect is "good enough"

A lot of law firms have stuck with WordPerfect because they had a 'lawer' version with all of the legal terms in the spelling dictionary long before MS.

I still have a copy of WP from about 2 versions ago that does everything I need, and if I ever have to upgrade, that's where I'm going (at least until OOo gets better).

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[hwyguy2]

Alt-F3 brings up reveal codes in WordPerfect, something that Word doesn't have.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Darby]

I was in Louisiana last week and the wife of one of my Father-in-Law's Coworkers cooked. This little Mexican lady made something AWESOME. Fish Tacos! Instead of beef, it was Tilapia (whitefish) deep fried in a seasoned batter.

In any case I have heard, and beliced that all US Mexican food tastes the same. After experiencing the real thisg, I KNOW all US Mexican food tastes the same!

Dude, that's a San Felipe thing.
They've had fast food restaurants in San Diego (Rubio's) serving them for well over a decade.

Just because you're behind the times doesn't mean the rest of us are.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[leonardluen]

the university i work at used to use wordperfect, but then we (the it department) made everyone change to MS Office, because the state had a contract with them. a few of those people would probably think this is good news that word perfect might be coming back...

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[BigDogCH]

So, the contract already included MS Office? So it was a financial decision?

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[leonardluen]

most likely yes. however people were used to wordperfect...and even though we have probably been using office almost 2 years now, a number of them would still like to go back.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[ernmas]

If a Government goes "hog wild" spending in February it could be because that is about the time the Departments get their money - the Appropriations Act being signed later and later in the Fiscal Year and then having to get the apportionments approved before having access to full-year funding. Prior to that, the funds they have access to are restricted - there is limited access to funds for supplies and subsequently many employees purchase ordinary office supplies out-of-pocket. Also, the money for computers is a part of the Salaries & Expenses appropriations. You may not be aware of this, but budget offices have to deal with an increase in salaries the beginning of January without having gotten additional money in the Appropriations Act to support it (budgets being based on "current" [read prior-year] salaries). I don't agree with departments receiving "much less" money following a year when they didn't obligate 100% of their funds, it is more than likely that reductions occur having nothing to do with the spending ratios. There are a large variety of reasons why funding levels differ from year to year and I won't bore anyone by going into them.

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[Recovery1]

Interesting.

Damn Lawyers

[Aneurysm9]

It's probably the lawyers' fault. For some reason a lot of them prefer Word Perfect.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[PortHaven]

as I understand, MS Word for years has mis-counted words 'legally recognized'. Corel counts accurately.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[mlmitton]

This is exactly what I was going to say. IANAL, but I work with them, and we regularly get WP files from our lawyer clients.

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.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[mspohr]

WordPerfect is entrenched in the legal profession. This is similar to the Microsoft vendor lock in at large corporations. Lawyers chooing to stay with (and upgrade) WordPerfect is not news.

If the DoJ had chosen to switch to Word, that would have been news since all the other lawyers would have to follow.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[HazE_nMe]

Thats strange, my mother has always worked for lawyers, and she has always used word perfect. I never knew that it was the norm for law firms to use it. My mother always said that there were things in WP that weren't in MS Word. She has been using WP since the days of MSDOS.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[syphoon]

It's true. WordPerfect has been a favourite of lawyers for a long time. I asked my father about it once (him being a lawyer and all) and he said it was because the indentation in WP was easier to get right for legal formats. Reading the other replies to the parent, I see there's a lot of other reasons too.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[Wyatt Earp]

It's because of word count. Word doesn't properly count the number of words in footnotes/endnotes and Lawyers need the word count to be spot on for billing purposes.

That's what a couple bosses who worked in IT in lawoffices told me. Some english professors told me about other things in WP that are better than MS Word for formatting, but I don't recall what they are.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[Penguinshit]

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!

Re:Damn Lawyers

[brjndr]

IAAL, and there are several reasons we use Word Perfect, but the main one would be that it is eacy to format pleading to a specific court's requirements in WP, and not in Word. Many/Most courts require the lines of the pages to be numbered for reference, usually every 5th line. Very easy to do in WP.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[stevetures]

I work as tech support at a law school (2nd tier I think) and many of the professors cannot give up wordperfect, and so we have to keep it on their machines. It has to do with some sort of Revel Codes functionality that word doesnt have (at least a mature version of it). Legal documents have to have an incredibly specific format that you spend semesters learning in law school. I've heard that some judges throw out documents that aren't formatted perfectly, though it sounds more like a scare story that the professors tell. BTW if Corel is reading this, get yer damn env. variables correct. Corel stores temp file locations in user profiles so that it you can't install it easily to a multi-user computer (e.g. lab computer). Versions wp10 wp11 and wp12 all have this problem. Lawers are crotchy... like old men unwilling to change. I can't tell you how long it took one of our professors to quit using DOS and move up to the machine that we gave him with w2k on it. He still has the F1-F12 code reference slip taped to his keyboard. Some people never let go.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[ars architectura]

The lawyers I know (who are also in-the-know) say that they get 'correct' numbering with WordPerfect, whereas it can be an ordeal with Word. So many things are numbered in legal briefs and documents, from the footnotes to the paragraphs to the lines on the page. If you've tried this with Word, you know how aggravating it can be to fix the counters that either reset themselves inexplicably, or continue in the wrong places, etc. WordPerfect just gets it right.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[swillden]

It's probably the lawyers' fault. For some reason a lot of them prefer Word Perfect.

I can understand why. I'm not a lawyer, but I write a lot of contracts and like most legal documents they tend to get very long and complex, with complex multi-level bulleting/numbering and frequent, multi-party tracked changes. We mostly use Microsoft Word, and it's a problem. When you start to push Word with long, complex documents, and especially when you turn on change tracking, it gets really unstable. I save every few minutes and make lots of manual backups because otherwise I *will* lose work on a regular basis.

I don't use WP much, but I know people who do, including a couple of medical transcriptionists who absolutely refuse to use anything else, because nothing else is reliable enough for them. WordPerfect just works.

I've decided that the next contract I write will be done in OpenOffice.org. I don't need any Word features that OOo doesn't have and it seems to be much more reliable.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[ares284]

I am by no means advocating Microsoft, but line numbering is just as easy in Word. Just click File: Page Setup: Layout Tab: Line Numbers (a button at the bottom). You can do it every 5 lines, etc, just like WordPerfect. I have worked in law offices, and I've never understood their obsession with WordPerfect. Half of them literally think it is the operating system of their computer. If I ask them to open any file or folder on their computer, they do so through WordPerfect's "File: Open" dialog box.

Oh well, to each his own ;) I'm personally a long-time Word user, but the footnote thing has driven me crazy a few times as well. IMHO, Word handles images very poorly as well. I've been messing with OpenOffice and will probably start using that from now on. =)

-Ares

Re:Damn Lawyers

[bersl2]

My father is a lawyer. They used Wordstar, then Wordperfect. He says that's basically how lots of his associates did things too.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[Trepalium]

Reveal Codes is the function. Frankly, it's invaluable in correcting a document that has formatting problems. It's similar to switching between a WYSIWYG HTML editor and the raw HTML markup. It's a hard feature to get used to not having, and makes frustrating layout problems like margins or tab stops changing slightly mid-page far easier to correct than Microsoft Word's method.

It's a feature that you'd never know you were missing unless you had used it, and then you'd realize it was invaluable.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[buzzini]

This isn't true, or at least is extremely dated. Years ago, Office began targeting the law segment hardcore, bringing in many, many lawyers/paralegals for feedback, usability tests, etc. WordPerfect's dominance in this sector -- both in terms of usage and product quality -- is completely gone, and has been for almost 10 years.

(And the guy who "runs" Office is Steven Sinofsky...unless you're referring to Jeff Raikes.)

Re:Damn Lawyers

[guanxi]

WordPerfect's dominance in this sector -- both in terms of usage and product quality -- is completely gone, and has been for almost 10 years.

I have several law firms as clients, and all use WordPerfect. And so do many of the firms they deal with.

I think Word now leads the market for large firms, but WordPerfect does very well. Almost all legal industry specific apps are compatible with both Word and Wordperfect, for example, so there must still be a market out there.

As for quality -- I've never met a WordPerfect user who was happy to switch, even in hindsight. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's certainly not clear-cut that the legal industry prefers Word.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[QuessFan]

And what were you using when you were doing summer intern or extern?

As a county law librarian, I don't handle much of it. But a lot of my law firm librarian peers do straigten out their summer associates very quickly.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[El Puerco Loco]

a few years back i used to do tech support for word perfect, they were up to 9 by the time i left, but we constantly had lawyers and legal secretaries calling about wp 5. they had to pay extra for support for it, and they couldn't get replacements for the keyboard templates, which uspet them to no end, but they would not give it up. the justice department was one of our biggest customers back then too, a good percentage of our calls came from them. there were plenty that were using 8 and 9 too. they have a lot of template and macros for legal docs built in, and they integrate with lawyer stuff like westlaw and hotdocs. we even had a legal edition available. and yeah, you can do some crazy stuff with the built in macro language.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[buzzini]

I have several law firms as clients, and all use WordPerfect. And so do many of the firms they deal with.

Anecdotal. WLRP, CS&M, Sullivan & Cromwell, Kirkland Ellis, etc, etc all use Word. I don't know that there is any public market share tracking available, but I do know that Office was satisfied that they had KO'd WP in the legal sector. However, you're probably right that there are many small shops out there clinging to legacy WP solutions.

Almost all legal industry specific apps are compatible with both Word and Wordperfect, for example, so there must still be a market out there.

Some are, many aren't. DealProof only supports WP up to version 10. Hotdocs has a bunch of Word-only features. Amicus Assembly has native support only for Word. Westlaw Manager only integrates with Word natively. WestKM doesn't support the latest WP version. Et cetera.

As for quality -- I've never met a WordPerfect user who was happy to switch, even in hindsight. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's certainly not clear-cut that the legal industry prefers Word.

Well neither of us can prove this. I'm sure there are many happy WP superusers who have no desire to switch. But I also know that the Word guys worked their asses off to make Word a great tool for legal professionals.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[HegemonXYZ]

Parent is completely incorrect. I am a paralegal in an IP litigation law firm in Palo Alto, and we are actually very tech savvy. We use WP, the opposing lawyers use WP, the judges use WP... I would say 90% of the legal docs I see (and I see a lot) are written in WP.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[The Fun Guy]

"5 years later I checked back in with that bankruptcy attorney and his office was still using the app!" ... and THAT is why the federal government likes WordPerfect. The latest version is 12.0, but documents that were created using 11,10,9,8,7,6 or even the legendary 5.1 for DOS are still openable, readable and, for the most part, still formatted correctly. Try opening a MSWord 6.0 for Win 3.1, or a MSWord95 document with Word2002 or WordXP... it's a very different experience. If it opens at all, it will be scrambled.

Once a single user (the Boss) goes from Word2002 to WordXP (because it came on this year's new computer), then everybody has to switch, beacuse the formatting gets all screwed up. Then, all of your legacy documents are screwed up, and it's easier just to redo them than to try to fix all the formatting crap.

Law firms, courts, federal agencies are built around absolutely unbelievably huge mountains of documents that have to be live and usable for years and years. It might take 5, 6, 7 years for a case to work its way up through appeals, or for project to be authorized, funded and executed; you just can't stop and rewrite/reformat everything because the office went from one version of Word to another. The trouble for WordPerfect is that if a 5-year-old version of your software will open documents created with the newest version, there's no cattle prod forcing the legacy user to upgrade, so that's a lost sale.

I've been using WordPerfect since 4.0 for DOS, when I switched from WordStar 9.0. I prefer it to Word, hands down. After the decree came down from on high, I've tried to use Word several times over the years, but the lack of continuity with legacy documents is just a killer.

Hrm.

[Geekenstein]

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?

Re:Hrm.

[Anonymous Coward]

But, encouraging that they are saving $5,000,000 over using Microsoft Office. What disturbs me is: "Justice also is urging employees to switch to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser".

Re:Hrm.

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

Re:Hrm.

[SpooForBrains]

I suppose it's the standard thing of needing to pay a Corporation so that there's someone to blame when it all inevitably goes tits up.

"We paid all this money to these people and it's all gone horribly wrong to the tune of billions of dollars! Who do I sue?"
"Er, a Free-Thinking Collective of Software Enthusiasts, sir"
"... Jeff, you're fired"

We all know about the illusion of culpability (look at Microsoft) but people still need to be able to blame someone else.

Re:Hrm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Other countries are spending their tax payer money to pay for the US software and other items. That is similar to importing Oil form the ME, Olive oil from Italy or wine from France. There is nothing wrong with that. If you want the government to save tax payer money, call your senator and ask him/her to support and use an open source alternative. Posting your comments here will not go very far.

Re:Hrm.

[BarryNorton]

Can we distinguish open source support from nationalism? I'm very much in favour of open source in public administration (in fact my colleagues work on a European project of the same name), but also in favour of free trade. (Incidentally we work in Sheffield so don't appreciate the moves you hint at that your government has already made illegally in the steel industry...)

Re:Hrm.

[AKnightCowboy]

Well, in the defense of these practices, it really isn't a viable answer to say "Well, I realize your software isn't working, I'll go post the question on Usenet or their Bugzilla system and wait a few days to see if anyone responds with a non-sarcastic response to RTFM." When shit hits the fan badly most companies (and the government) are more than willing to pay to get a warm body on the other end of a phone to take the heat.. even if they are in Banglore.

Re:Hrm.

[Noksagt]

I'm sure Sun would be willing to address each of these points if the government had bought into Star Office (which uses much of the OO.o codebase). There are also independent support providers which would write out a contract & provide training for OO.o.

Re:Hrm.

[fatjesus]

Government agencies should by products with the best value to cost ratio regardless of the country of origin. The same goes for private organizations. It's simple economics. Adam Smith explained it clearly over 200 years ago, Why people still don't get it is beyond me.

Re:Hrm.

[legirons]

"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."

Well out of all people, they've probably spent the most time reviewing why Microsoft is a bad place to spend money inside the country...

"Why not Open Office?"

They're the government. Spending your money is what they do.

Re:Hrm.

[DrXym]

I use Open Office every day and while it's pretty usable it's seriously lacking in some areas. It's only when you look for them that you realise how primitive they are in comparison to MS Office (or any other commercial suite). For example the drawing app is just evil, plain and simple. The revision control is also nothing to write home about and buried in a submenu. There's also no outline mode which is a major omission if you write big docs.

Still, I have OO 2.0 beta and there is hope that its going in the right direction. It's still not perfect but the UI seems to have been reworked to simplify some things and the drawing app is *much* better.

Re:Hrm.

[BarryNorton]

Well, free trade works well with nations that understand it the same way we do. Canada does. [my bold text]

Did you also RTFA? Are you trying to engage us in a political discussion beyond the Canadian company involved (and partially revoke NAFTA)?

Re:Hrm.

[SpooForBrains]

Yes, absolutely, but what people often don't realise that it's a much better financial decision to take the money and spend it on a knowledgeable consultancy/development team that can actually fix these problems, than spending it on a monkey in a call centre who'll add your ticket to their system, shove it to the bottom of the queue and ignore it for three years.

Re:Hrm.

[kebes]

Keep in mind that 99% of Canadians (home users and businesses) use MS Office, so if the US Gov sends a few million $ into Canada, it's hardly noticeable in the grand scheme of things.

Re:Hrm.

[Kismet]

When WordPerfect was just WordPerfect, it was a U.S. company based in Orem, Utah. You may recall the days when WordPerfect was pratically the only game in town when it came to word processing.

When MS got into the office software business, WordPerfect could not keep up. The company was bought by Novell, then by Corel. A languishing Corel soon shut down the old U.S. operations (which were still responible for the Office suite at the time) and moved everything back to Ottawa.

Anyway, during WordPerfect's best days, probably all of the government agencies were using it. Most likely there are still a lot of WP documents sitting around, and a lot of WP expertise besides. That a U.S. government agency would choose Corel over MS is nothing new.

Re:Hrm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because when this eval and bid process was started, OOo was not really a viable alternative.

You make it sound like it is now ;)

Nothing's really changed in OO.org. It's still slow, ugly, poor usability (floating menus for choosing headings? -- even firefox moved their find to the side rather than floating over and obscuring text you're trying to read).

OO.org needs to get a better UI, preferably by ripping off MS Word / Corel (it's not like they haven't done it to each other a million times anyway -- or that original interface ideas for word processors would even be useful considering how stabilised the market is)

Re:Hrm.

[Zemran]

Isn't it better to spend in the wisest way rather than the cheapest way which often turns out the most expensive?

Re:Hrm.

[bani]

sun offers 2) and 3)

http://www.sun.com/service/support/software/open of fice/

Re:Hrm.

[jyoull]

Actually, WordPerfect, as they told it, got a major screwing-over from Microsoft in conjunction with some "confusion" over the future of OS/2.

The story was that WP was told that OS/2 was it, Windows was a transitional product. And WPCorp put all its resources into developing a new GUI version of WordPerfect for that operating system... well into the process, the famous MSFT/IBM tiff occurred, MSFT announced Windows was the future, and oh by the way, we also have a great new graphical word processor for it, Word for Windows 1.0! That was the beginning of WPCorp's troubles, and also they weren't too happy about they way they'd been played.

Re:Hrm.

[Master Bait]

Because OOorg doesn't have a WordPerfect filter.

Re:Hrm.

[malkavian]

Because it's still "new". Word Perfect has been round for years, and is a known name.
It's trusted.

For any Government/Large corporation, you're not looking for something new with all the shiny knobs and bells. You're looking for something that's ground it's heels in a little, and has earned your trust by proving itself over the course of years.

Maybe, in time, Star Office will get a look in (I hope so).
But for now, the Big Picture is either Corel, or Microsoft.

Re:Hrm.

[chuck]

Whoa, there's oil reserves in Maine? Holy crap, the whole geopolitical picture just changed for me!

Re:Hrm.

[supabeast!]

Why not OpenOffice? How about because lawyers need a Word Processor with features designed for them, and not one with features added in because some guy wrote the code and uploaded it?

OpenOffice is bloatware, and lawyers get paid WAY too much money for them to have to spend time learning to navigate around all of cruft that has accumulated over the years.

Re:Hrm.

[Reapman]

heh... you do realize that most countries "send tax dollars out of country with a software contract award."? Canadian goverment (or at least the part ofit I work in) uses MS Office... a US based company.

Re:Hrm.

[xgamer04]

Um, yeah. So everything the US Gov't spends money on should come from here? It's not really possible. Some things can't be made here (I'm talking about some natural elements that are not found in the USA, for example: chromium). Also, nearly all high-tech parts (circuit boards, etc) are made in places like Taiwan.

Re:Hrm.

[AKnightCowboy]

I'm not sure what software companies you're dealing with that do that, but all the commercial software companies we have contracts with are more than helpful at solving our issues and a ticket rarely sits in a queue for a week without being escalated to their senior developers. Granted, these are smaller security-oriented companies we buy products from and not Microsoft, but commercial software vendors aren't all completely useless.

Re:Hrm.

[Dolly_Llama]

If you're uncomfortable with this, you'll love that BAE Systems just bought United Defense Industries, the maker of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

Re:Hrm.

[QuietLagoon]

Then you should also be concerned about the contracts for the new Presidential helicopters, and the tax benefits that are given to corporations who move their corporate headquarters offshore, etc.

[mod: feel free to mark as off-topic :-) ]

Re:Hrm.

[water-and-sewer]

It's called free trade and it's been known to work since before the first guy put on a hat and said "I'm an economist."

If your government "sends your tax dollars out of the country" to purchase a less expensive product, it will have more cash left over to give you a tax break, subsidize your cheap gasoline, or track down the scumbags that caused 9/11.

On the other hand, it will also have more money to invade countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 and call it "liberation." Now that's something you should be disturbed about.

Shame that the Justice Department

[tabkey12]

always seems to favour MSFT in court cases...

Re:Shame that the Justice Department

[jadavis]

They should. If the government would just stop buying MS products, MS would no longer have a monopoly.

However, the government really wanted to use the law to intervene in private contracts it had with MS, to make them more friendly to the government. That's fascism: the government buys almost exclusively MS products, and then uses the law (not just it's market power) to control the terms of those contracts.

Re:Shame that the Justice Department

[KarmaMB84]

I wonder how many of the real attornies (as opposed to their secretaries) were using copies of WordPerfect they bought themselves :O

So

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Does this mean they'll spend 0.1% less on Microsoft software each year?

The reason they didn't choose Opera

[WillAffleckUW]

is that most of the Homeland Insecurity guys like Country music instead.

No Noose

[matt-larose]

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 ;)

Re:No Noose

[RM6f9]

It actually looked a bit punny to me...

Re:No Noose

[matt-larose]

umm no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_jure

Re:No Noose

[HaeMaker]

Poster has this right. It means "by law", it is similar to "de facto", which is "by fact".

I am also aware of this fact. WordPerfect embraced the legal community very early on, and made it easy to generate pleading papers in WP. Since there is a lot of inertia, it is hard to switch.

Many courts insist electronic copies are submitted in WordPerfect format.

Re:No Noose

[medelliadegray]

perhaps using corel was a part of MS's strategy.

while i have no legal background, could it be possible for the laywers to use a line such as "microsoft is not a monopoly, heck, we ourselves use corel wp over microsoft's product"

Re:No Noose

[delirium of disorder]

Corel employees listen to NOFX?

Kick ass.

Word Perfect is great because it has exellent normal WYSIWYG functionality AND reveal codes for debugging, thanks for working for a company willing to challenge Microsoft.

Re:open office?

[ackthpt]

2 million? ouch. just use open office

While I wouldn't discount Open Office, $2 million to outfit such a large bureaucracy as the DoJ sounds like chicken feed. Heck, I've been places where we spent more than $2 million dollars, per year, for only about 1,000 people. (Intial outlay is high, then upgrades and service keep you bleeding.)

It makes sense from a lawyer's standpoint.

[and by]

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.

Re:It makes sense from a lawyer's standpoint.

[fm6]

Indeed. I know several lawyers, and the only ones that don't use WordPerfect work for a firm that has Microsoft as a client!

This is just a case of product lockin, the same effect that keeps Microsoft dominant in most offices. Notice that the two big exceptions (FBI and DEA) are primarily police agencies, and thus don't nearly as much legal document preparation as does the main Justice Department.

Re:It makes sense from a lawyer's standpoint.

[Dr. Evil]

It's not product lockin!

Wordperfect is better for what they do.

The only reason anyone even considered dumping all their internal macros and development work to move away Wordperfect was for document compatibility with MS Word.

Perfect compatibilty with MS Word is the main force which pushes MS Word into everyone's workplace. Word did not spread from proprietary lock-in, that merely entrenched it. Word spread because businesses were foolishly using its proprietary documents for document exchange.

If Word were a superior product, then yes, lock-in through proprietary programs and macros would create a lock-in effect, but it's hard to argue that Word's macros, programming and document format is any less proprietary.

Re:It makes sense from a lawyer's standpoint.

[fm6]

It's not product lockin!

Wordperfect is better for what they do.

Please. Show me a single feature in WordPerfect that's law-oriented and that isn't in Word. Actually, there couldn't be since both products are highly customizable and there are tons of third-party vendors selling customizations. But of course lawyers, having spent a fortune buying WordPerfect customizations, and training their staff to use them, are reluctant to retool for Word. Sounds like lockin to me.

Word did not spread from proprietary lock-in, that merely entrenched it. Word spread because businesses were foolishly using its proprietary documents for document exchange.

They don't have proprietary lockin, they just depend on a proprietary format? I don't get the distinction.

If Word were a superior product, then yes, lock-in through proprietary programs and macros would create a lock-in effect...

Even if we could agree which product is "superior" (people tend to like what they're used to, not what's more carefully designed), that has nothing to do with lockin. Lockin has to do the difficult of changing products. Once people are used to doing things a certain way, it's very hard to get them to retool. That's why almost nobody uses the Dvorak keyboard. Indeed, I'm convinced that once a product dominates a market, it actually helps if the product has bugs. That means that users have invested a lot of effort coping with those bugs -- an effort they're not about to write off.

Re:It makes sense from a lawyer's standpoint.

[Dr. Evil]

"Please. Show me a single feature in WordPerfect that's law-oriented and that isn't in Word"

I would give it to you, but the macro I use to import that paragraph was designed for Office 95, and I couldn't get a license for it with my new machine. Our I.T. Department is hiring a VB.net developer, so it will be a few months before this problem is rectified.

Why upgrade if your current software works?

How Does A Purchasing Decision Worth of YRO??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so the DOJ chooses to buy one over the other. What's the big deal here? If Corel fit their requirements, why would anybody else care so much?

This story has nothing to do with "rights". Your rights and mine are not affected by this story.

Nothing to see here. Please move on.

Re:How Does A Purchasing Decision Worth of YRO??!!

[2nd Post!]

If CO is equivalent to MO, but costs 70% of Microsoft, then that's my tax money saved; that's less taxes I pay. So in so far as my 'rights', that 's one thing.

The other thing? They put their money where their mouth is. If MS is bad, and Office is bad... don't use it.

As for rights? Well, it only means this demonstrates (either by success or failure) what the alternatives to Office are.

FBI

[tarquin_fim_bim]

You'd have thought that this organisation would have demanded the most advanced and reliable technology available. Mr. Clippy: Are you falsifying a confession?

Re:open office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the Proposed 2006 Budget, and you'll see how little 2mil really is.

Sanity?

[johnthorensen]

Has sanity set in you ask? No, the Justice Department saw that they couldn't still battle Microsoft in their courts and at the same time drink the Kool-Aid themselves. So it's not sanity, just an amazing absence of hypocrisy.

-JT

Re:Sanity?

[Rob Y.]

More like the Justice Department saw that they couldn't pretend to still battle Microsoft in their courts...

So they use WordPerfect and say, "see, our settlement was a good thing. No monopoly here."

Re:What?

[joeljkp]

Perhaps this hasn't occurred to you guys, but maybe -- just maybe -- WordPerfect was a better solution for the DoJ than OOo was.

Do you know what their requirements are? Were you in the board room when this deal was being discussed?

The real reason for lack of interagency coop

[Red Moose]

So....with the FBI *not* having Corel and say, the CIA *does* have it, is this a reason why interagency cooperation is difficult? E.g., Some agent gets info of a terrorist plot and his comp crashes and all he has is the stupid fucking happy-dog in Office to help him? Does the FBI send stupid Outlook HTML emails to the CIA saying look this crazy fucker is going to Guatemala to buy suitcase bombs so stop him, but the CIA get it and can't read crappy illegible Outlook mail, so they send it to the NSA who with their l33t sk1llz transfer it to .txt but they can't get the information out because it's deep inside loads supid meta bullshit from Outlook.

How about no-one buys anything for any amount and just uses Open Office.

Re:The real reason for lack of interagency coop

[gl4ss]

if they're using messenger in army then probably.

Re:The real reason for lack of interagency coop

[LargeWu]

Haven't you seen 24? Systems compatability doesn't matter when it's the government. And that goes double if they're fighting terrorists. Hell, they could reroute satellites from an Atari 2600 if they were so inclined.

Re:The real reason for lack of interagency coop

[0BoDy]

to avoid posting duplicate: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141694&cid =11874143

Re:Hrm. (OOo)

[sho222]

I have to agree with the parent. I would love to see the gov move to OOo, and open source in general. However, even casual users of OOo repot major show-stopper bugs (espectially wrt interoperability with legacy MS Office docs). Commercial office suites like Corel's and Microsoft's are simply more stable at this point.

Perhaps when OOo 2.0 becomes stable there can be an argument for moving to open source desktop applications, but until then, I can't blame the gov't for trying to stick to the tried and true.

Just to head something off...

[Reality Master 101]

I can't resist pointing this out, yet again: No, reveal codes is NOT a good thing. It's a complete kludge. If you need a Reveal Codes feature, then that shows that the word processor is badly designed.

I was firmly in the reveal codes camp until I actually learned how to use Word, and then I realized what an atrocity Reveal Codes really was. The concept of Styles is far, far better.

Re:Just to head something off...

[mrchaotica]

The concept of Styles is far, far better.

Yeah, just wait until you discover LaTeX or DocBook!

Re:Just to head something off...

[ClosedSource]

Perhaps the Word Perfect corporation should have patented "Reveal Codes" way back when. I think HTML looks very similiar to it.

Re:Just to head something off...

[eclectus]

Strange, I've often thought that Word would benefit from a 'Reveal Codes' option (never mind the obvious 'reveal file format' jokes), as word often does incomprehensible things like deleting more that what I ask it too, or change styles of existing text when I delete over a style boundary, and other strange behaviours. And the concept of 'Reveal Codes' makes a whole lot of sence when people insist on using Word for html editing.

Re:Just to head something off...

[scarpa]

The MS Word equivalent is "Reveal Formatting". Shows what styles are applied to your selection, etc..

Re:Just to head something off...

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

You are actually posting on Slashdot anonymously, personally attacking someone, and insulting Microsoft products? Gotta be a troll.

The Reason: Corel's "Microsoft" Modes

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does the new WordPerfect 12 edition allow you to go back in time to the old "blue screen" days, with one easy radio button selection, you can alter WordPerfect's interface to match Microsoft's.

For instance, I installed Quattro Pro and Presentations today after a client's files required them. I almost told the client to go to hell, but as you already know, it's the PROFIT!!?! step that keeps my mouth shut ;).

Both Quattro Pro and Presentations, upon launching, ask if they should be run in "Microsoft Excel" mode and "Microsoft PowerPoint" mode respectively. Not that this does anything to make the programs any better looking, but it does allow for a pre-configured key mapping that most Microsoft Office users will feel comfortable with.

Re:The Reason: Corel's "Microsoft" Modes

[Caspian]

Key mapping? KEY mapping? The vast majority of MS Office users don't use the keys, they use the menus.

Not Only That, But...

[ackthpt]

Justice Management Division

What package do you suppose they use for Justice Management?

Re:Not Only That, But...

[drinkypoo]

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that their idea of Justice Management is closely akin to Microsoft's idea of Rights Management...

Re:Get used to it.

[Bastian]

Your government does it all the time. Only normally, it's not the underdog company, and the company is based in a tax haven or something like that.

Compared to some of the contracts I've seen awarded lately, this barely even counts as overseas. Besides, we could use more trade with Canada.

Hahaha

[mrluisp]

is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?

Perhaps you've forgotten that Microsoft owns a sizeable amount of Corel and stands to profit from this deal anyways.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Corel were a woman, I wouldn't fuck her with a stolen dick.

Me neither. Dicks can be traced, even with the serial number filed off. Much better to fuck her with a wooden dick you've carved yourself, or a wiffleball bat.

Re:patriotic

[prider]

how pathetic... ... and one country to rule them all ;)

Not new: Corel/Wordperfect has been...

[claussenvenable]

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.

WordPerfect and law firms

[Black Art]

Word Perfect used to be the defacto standard word processor for law firms. Glad to see that they are actually sticking with WP and not running to Word just because everyone else is.

In the long run they might be better off with Open Office. The support for non-Microsoft OSes has been pretty weak. The Mac version has not been updated in years and the Linux version is more of an illusion than a real program.

Re:WordPerfect and law firms

[Tenebrious1]

Word Perfect used to be the defacto standard word processor for law firms. Glad to see that they are actually sticking with WP and not running to Word just because everyone else is.

Sadly, it's no longer the case. With most clients nowadays using Word, we've been phasing out support for WP; we haven't upgraded WP in two generations of images and are definitely not going to on our next rev. It's unfortunate since I think it's a superior product, but it doesn't make much financial sense if you have thousands of clients who need word compatibility, and only a few dozen who use WP.

More so today; it used to be that if a client wanted a document, we'd print it out and fedex it. Today, we send it as an attachment to email, thus it's even more important to use the same document format.

In the long run, it's hard to say. Large law firms will move with the trends of large corporations; if the large corporations switch to Linux on the desktop and OO, then we'll see large firms switching to OO; large firms have the resources to do so. Smaller firms on the other hand may stick with MS Office, since the vast majority of clients, small businesses, will probably stick with MS on their systems.

um, no...

[RaZ0r]

Has sanity finally set in, or is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?

No, someone in purchasing just happened to find something cheaper that could get the job done.

Move along, nothing to see here. (as usual)

Re:um, no...

[RaZ0r]

Damn, I knew I was forgetting something!

Maybe they just made a mistake and put in the wrong item number.

Guess it would have helped to RTFA. But who around here does that anyways?

good drugs

[kirkb]

but not the Drug Enforcement Administration, which use Microsoft's Office business software exclusively

Hmmm... I wonder what they're smoking...

Re:good drugs

[quarkscat]

Even worse than what you think -- the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) is the umbrella organization for a lot of government agencies, post 9-11. Some "brainiac" at DHS decided to standardize on MSFT OSes and Apps for their entire organization, to the tune of a >$6 Billion USD multi-year contract. This decision was made in spite of warnings from numerous independent IT security experts beforehand.

The only thing I can figure is that it was either (1) rank stupidity, or (2) a payoff to MSFT for leaving gaping security holes in their OSes and Apps (for the spooks). IMHO, it makes the DHS even more oxymoronic than their name & policies imply. I base this on: US Patriot Act == GOOD; MATRIX == GOOD; secure borders != GOOD; secure seaports != GOOD; ( ...the list goes on ad nauseum).

Ugh

[rasafras]

I don't care about monopolistic issues or anything (at least, not in this case), but having used both... Word is way better than WordPerfect, IMHO. It's just a matter of preference, but I find WordPerfect to be more clumsy and irritating.

perhaps not

[Brigadier]

This is just speculation. But there are so many legalities regarding federal contracts that i'm sure Corel has to jump through some hoops. An example would be their subcontractors must be US based or maybe the boxes have to be fabricated by disadvantaged disabled US veterans or something to that nature.

I call...

[CrackedButter]

Blip!

Re:Get used to it.

[RichMan]

Corel almost imploded a while back. Bought out by some US company and reverted to private ownership. Probably still do development work here in the third world called Canada. If it wern't for the heating costs we would probably be a real threat.

Re:Get used to it.

[ShieldW0lf]

Compared to some of the contracts I've seen awarded lately, this barely even counts as overseas. Besides, we could use more trade with Canada.

As a matter of fact, in light of the fact that you can walk from the US to Canada, one might even say that it DOESN'T count as overseas at all! :D

Haha

[rm999]

$13.2 million? that's like a penny to Microsoft.

"What's a quarter?"
-Bill Gates on Family Guy

But, but...

[kd7cqn]

doesn't Microsoft own about half of Corel? I thought I saw something a year or two ago that MS had purchased controlling interest in Corel. So really, the Feds didn't change who they pay their money to. They just changed to a better software.

Re:But, but...

[pilgrim23]

Its OK,... thanks to the whole MS anti-trust thing, Microsoft now pays BUCKS in lobby fees. Fees they never used to pay. THAT was the plan all along, so in other words: its ok, Microsoft owns 1/2 of the Justice Department too.

Re:But, but...

[Suppafly]

doesn't Microsoft own about half of Corel?

No.

Taxpayer Money & American Companies

[zensmile]

While I would rather not see more of the Microsoft monopoly. I do not like the fact that the government is sending my money to a foreign company when there is a perfectly viable American company selling competing software. Just my $0.02.

Re:Taxpayer Money & American Companies

[Zemran]

What foreign company? Now Corel is own by SF venture... anyway, as I have already said, it is better to spend wisely as it works out cheaper.

Re:Well it'd be more like "Why not Sun?"

[allenw]

According to StarOffice Volume Pricing, Sun will do support for $25 per user for StarOffice 7 for 10,000+ users.... and that's before any other negotiation has happened.

That seems pretty darn cheap.

This is good for Microsoft!

[Zangief]

Now the DoJ can't say MS is a monopoly, because thew DoJ itself doesn't use their products!!

Even when MS lose, it wins!! They are the devil, I tell you!

Re:This is good for Microsoft!

[shawb]

Well, it means the DoJ can't say that MS is a monopoly in the field of office productivity software. However in terms of the OS market on business PCs... yeah. And they can use their drastically greater marketshare in OS installs to leverage an unfair advantage over their competition in other markets (Browser, Media Player, and of course arguably the most widely used pieces of software in the corporate world... Solitaire and Minesweeper.)

Re:patriotic

[tthomas48]

Why would he care? He believes shipping jobs overseas is good for the economy.

Watch for more

[KingOfTheNerds]

As a former corel employee I'm to finally see the governement switching to our WP. Our talks to sell our products to the justice department began over two years ago, but by the time I was layed off I was sure that they were never going to follow through. We were not just in talks about Word Perfect so be sure to watch out for other Corel products being adopted by some government agencies soon.

This is Your Rights Online Because????

[cranos]

Im sorry I thought it was going to be a story about somebody infringing or potentially infringing my rights online, obviously I was mistaken.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

I support the clerical staff here at a federal courthouse. WordPerfect has been established since version 4. When something goes wrong, they hit the keystroke shortcut to Reveal Codes-- the same shortcut they used in the 80's! Some of our staff still use the Fkey template from years ago-- we have to write some macros by hand to make it work. I find it extremely painful, but they love it. Every attempt to change programs has died in committee. At the DOJ they probably touted all the new Corel features and made a big deal about it, but there's only one REAL reason they're buying. And it has nothing to do with "blipping Microsoft dominance".

Lawyers prefer it...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...because they believe it to be less likely to contain traces of (liability causing) deleted text. Word, on the other hand, has been known to leave deleted text still in the binary .doc file.

Reveal codes is not mutuallly exclusive to styles

[Noksagt]

Word Perfect has styles too!

Reveal codes is an absolutely wonderful feature for fixing broken documents. Not everyone uses Word styles (I'm tempted to say a minority do) & you WILL get broken, kludgy documents. If for no other reason than this, it would be nice to see where codes start/stop.

It is nice to see exactly where an image is anchored or when a hyphen/spacing is breaking/nonreaking and when these or line/page breaks are optional or forced.

It is also extremely useful to see when a STYLE starts/stops! Third-parties sell an atrocious hack to put a reveal codes feature into Word. The real thing is better.

It is the next best feature to using transparent plaintext formats like docbook/LaTeX, where you can get the same info.

Reference...

[Animaether]

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?c ourt=7th&navby=case&no=991754A

Re:Hahaha - incorrect

[Andre060]

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.

Re:patriotic

[einhverfr]

How patriotic, the American gov't chooses canadian software over its own? Has GWB found out about this?

Now you understand why Brazil is going Open Source.....

Actually I wondered about this too.... Why should the US government depend on foreign-made software? What if the Canadian Government puts in surveillance technology into it so that they can keep tabs on classified data? Maybe the crypto that the use has been compromised by the Canadian government.

Hmm

[glrotate]

Most lawfirms switched around 99. With softsolutions going bye bye and novell going nowhere, the move to MS / PC-DOCS was widespread.

Many firms doing heavy commercial law work switched earlier.

Memories...

[fwice]

I recall using wordperfect on my 286, 386, 486, and my pentium machine. Whenever I had an MS Office product to compare it against, it always ran better. Even when bought by Corel and changed around for that.

Microsoft has a sheisty history here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/2/5/42507 d20-6556-4525-9748-b45723a5f6bc/WordPerfectFS.doc/

and wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect/

Re:Doesn't MS own Corel?

[Andre060]

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.

Don't look for sanity...

[javaxman]

If you look at TFA, it mentions near the end that not only do they also buy MS Office anyway ( your tax dollars at work! ), but the Justice department is also trying to get people to use IE.

No sanity there...

OASIS?

[bogaboga]

Does this Corel product open files based on the OASIS standard, which include OpenOffice.org and KOffice? It has been some time since I last heard of this Corel product. In Canada, which I call home and Toronto, where the magic of the Financial might happens, Corel's products are not that well known. It's ironic that Canadians know MS Office as a product for every office than their own Corel.

Hahaha on you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you've forgotten that Microsoft sold its share in Corel to a venture capitalist. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Hahaha on you!

[Anonymous Bullard]

Perhaps you've forgotten that Microsoft sold its share in Corel to a venture capitalist. Nothing to see here, move along.

The industry's best kept secret, eh?

MS took de facto control of Corel through a series of shady moves worthy of the Groklaw site's attention.

In late 2003 MS dumped their 20% + stake to MS co-founder Paul Allen's venture manipulation firm (Vector) which was staffed with ex-MS executives and other former execs from the company which had earlier "consulted" Corel bosses to commit the Linux U-turn (McKinsey consultancy) and join the MS.NET bandwagon, or another investment banking company which later gave Corel's bosses financial advice to sell out at bottom prices.

As a sugaring on the top, Corel chairman James Baillie's own law firm (Baillie's soul was sold in the transaction too) was hired by the MS goons Vector to fight against Corel's shareholders.

Google for these names and "corelrescue" to learn how MS conducts corporate hijackings of their competitors in broad daylight and without a squeak from the courts or regulators.

Still Windows-only

[mmeister]

Going with WordPerfect doesn't buy you much these days. It's still only a Windows-only solution. Corel WordPerfect for Mac doesn't support OS X and I believe the Linux version was discontinued.

Microsoft is still making money off this deal, I guess that's why they're a monopoly.

Switching to IE?

[sean23007]

She said Justice also is urging employees to switch to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser, which was the subject of the government's antitrust case.

The article also says that they were using Netscape up until a month ago, and are now switching to IE? Why? Why not stay off IE, if you're already off? Especially as a government agency of the same government that's deemed IE unsafe for use? What's going on here?

It's true...

[Omega]

I've known several attorneys, and they all use WordPerfect -- their offices are also networked with Novell Netware. The reason is largely historical. Basically, all the major law firms were early adopters of personal computers. One of the early PC networking solutions was Netware and the most popular early word processor was WordPerfect. Even post-1995, a lot of these firms have stuck with this solution because their techs and staff are just more familiar with their tools. For a while I think Microsoft shipped Word with a "Word Perfect emulation mode" to try to lure away the lawfirms -- but it didn't take.

Re:What?

[drinkypoo]

They're spending US$2M a year on this software. Perhaps it would have been a better use of that money to develop the software they'd need to make OO.o to do what they want - or just enhance OO.o directly - and free themselves from the need for proprietary office software permanently. Why are we supposed to rejoice when a part of the federal government leaves one commercial package for another commercial package?

WP is just as proprietary and just as closed

[stratjakt]

Dumb fucks and your anti-M$ crusade. This is no better than if they chose MS Office.

If anything, it's worse and will hamper communications between agencies and to the general public, who will now need to shell out for both MSOffice and WP if they're to deal with gov't.

But oh oh oh MS lost a sale!! hoorah!

and microsoft gets some money from it

[ergean]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/11/201320 4&tid=132&tid=109&tid=98 and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/02/220238 &tid=132 so... no comment

100 years from now?

[tacokill]

So what happens 100 years from now when my grandchildren want to review some of these documents?

Re:100 years from now?

[Jeff Mahoney]

Someone decides to write a PC emulator in the same "oh neat" fashion of the c-64 in a joystick.

or

"In The Future, Everything Will Work" - Schwa Corporation

Take your pick.

Re:100 years from now?

[No. 24601]

So what happens 100 years from now when my grandchildren want to review some of these documents?

OpenOffice already supports WordPerfect.

Re:Doesn't MS own Corel?

[Suppafly]

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.

That's how trade deficits build

[adsl]

When your own government spurns the equivalent US Poduct and buys outside the borders.

Corporate Decision.

[Noxx]

Face it, this isn't a rare case of sanity in the DOJ *or* a blip. It's somebody high up in the DOJ with authority over purchasing who decided that it would look ridiculous for the DOJ to prosecute a high-profile software company, achieve a questionable resolution, and then turn around to use their software exclusively.

No difference between this and a software company using their own inferior in-house software rather than purchase something outside...it might make them look bad. Image counts for more than logic.

And yes there is a difference between an executive branch office and a publicly traded corporation...but the same internal politics still apply.

Nothing nefarious here

[hal9000(jr)]

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).

Re:What?

[bruno]

I don't know for sure what their requirements were, but I suspect very strongly that they needed an office productivy suite.

It is an office productivity suite, for Christ sake, not a very specialized, engineering, mathematical or scientific thing!

In addition

[Andy Dodd]

As mentioned earlier, lawyers tend to prefer WordPerfect for a number of reasons. The Justice Department has a lot of those. :)

OpenOffice may actually have proven to be totally unsuitable for the lawyers in the Justice Department, just as MS Office has proven to be wholly unsuitable.

In addition to historic precedent, Corel has been solidifying their niche market by catering towards lawyers. I think they are the only word processor developer that has actually marketed a version specifically catered towards lawyers, and I believe their general overall development is heavily influenced by the needs of one particular market which Corel is well-established in and wants to stay well-established in.

Unlike MS, Corel is maintaining a stranglehold on that particular market not by underhanded tactics, but by releasing a product that is clearly superior for that particular niche.

I would not be surprised if in addition to the fact that OO has only recently become viable in general, OO may be wholly unsuitable for lawyers just as MS Office still is.

Re:In addition

[earthforce_1]

Actually, it would be helpful for any law clerks or paralegals (Pamela are you there?) or lawyers to give critical feedback to the Oo developers, so any perceived deficiencies or missing features can be added to the next release.

Re:In addition

[zooblethorpe]

As a fellow OOo user, I say, great! Not great that it's got deficiencies, but great that you're aware of them. Please, I ask you to go over to http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_is sues.html, register, and start by looking up those deficiencies -- a lot of my own (and several others') pet peeves have been fixed or at least improved in the move to v2.0. Any issues you've run across that haven't been addressed deserve attention, so go ahead and be specific! File a bug report, and get the ball rolling to make something better. The best MS will do is maybe be polite in ignoring you (c.f. previous comment about problems in Word that show no sign of going away).

Re:Hahaha - incorrect

[bayerwerke]

Sold? Some would say 'dumped' with the clear intention of harming Corel's stock value, which certainly did happen.

They'll just buy Corel

[UrlFlynn]

If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em!

Re:What?

[ncb000gt]

while i haven't used Word Perfect in a long time...or any corel software in a long time, i find it very difficult to see where WP would be far superior to OpenOffice. In fact...I really don't think that open office would have come up at this meeting...The govt is pretty affraid of open source software. I worked for them and open standards are not their cup of tea...They are still heavily involved in M$ and old crappy technology, thats what I saw in the tech dept i was in for a while. Also, I don't mind so much that the money is moving somewhere else but it is entirely illogical to continue to spend money for a similar product that is free. I don't care who you are and what govt agency you are with. It makes more sense, if the product is as good or even maybe a little less, to not spend the money directly and then pay a developer 70,000 a year to finish it up and fix it or a team of developers...it would be less costly than the 2 mill they are paying now... Also, Open Office has just released 2.0 Beta, and while it is in beta it could prove to be the best alternative now. So it is just more wasted cash. just my thoughts... - nc

Re:Doesn't MS own Corel?

[bayerwerke]

Microsoft paid Corel to take their developers off Linux and work on some vaporware, .NET stuff for BSD (or something like that)then Microsoft dumped their investment in Corel. As intended, Corel's stock plummeted and they almost went under until the private buyout. An example of Microsoft amoral conduct if there ever was one.

Re:Updates - already has happened

[bayerwerke]

XP SP2 already does harmfully affect WordPerfect Suite. You can read more about it at microsoft.com.

Not for these people

[Andy Dodd]

Numerous still-unfixed bugs in Word leave it almost wholly unsuitable for legal work. Look above for a link to case law where some legal team got screwed royally because Word fucked up something as simple as a word count.

WordPerfect has been dominant in legal markets for a long time, even moreso since Corel has in some ways been catering development specifically to the needs of lawyers.

The result is a program that may not be better for general use, but is superior for lawyers.

Note that the DOJ has a shload of lawyers...

I am a DOJ Attorney

[Tax Boy]

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.

Re:I am a DOJ Attorney

[Anita Coney]

I agree. Lawyers go with Wordperfect like a moth to the flame. I would have been more shocked if they started using MS Office.

Re:I am a DOJ Attorney

[MyLongNickName]

Out of curosity, why do you say this? Not disputing. Just intrigued.

You Know the Drill

[Greyfox]

Announce that you're going with $COMPETING_PRODUCT to get Microsoft to cut you huge discounts. I expect that in a couple of weeks an announcement will come out that Microsoft pulled a bulk discount out of their ass and that the DOJ will be going with Office, after all.

Though I must admit to being a bit puzzled as to why they didn't say they're going with an all-linux solution. Nothing makes Microsoft crap their pants and shoot that bulk discount out faster than saying you're going with Linux...

Canada is an American Company

[bayerwerke]

Americans own almost as much in Canada as the Japanese own in the United States. Also, 'perfectly viable', where did you come up with that assesment?

Send lawyers, guns and money.

[windowpain]

Well since law firms are one of the last bastions of WordPefect users it actually almost makes sense for the DOJ to go with WP.

Because of course this couldn't have anything to do with MS's and DOJ's visceral antipithy for each other, would it?

DOJ has always used WordPerfect ! ! !

[kevinkdawgy]

I worked at DOJ for years, I was there from WordPerfect 5.0, 5.1, 6.0 (so bad) and finally a version that worked ok, WordPerfect for Windows 6.1. WordPerfect is a legacy item, it is not something new. Also, the US Courts use WordPerfect as the defacto wordprocessor in all 94 judicial districts.

yah for the DOJ

[gad_zuki!]

Smart choice, now they can draft up warrants for non-violent drug offenders without clippy asking, "I see you're doing something quite draconian here, may I help?"

Now John Aschcroft can write lyrics without the green squiggly line getting in the way of his immense creativity!

With such a large contract I'm sure Corel was able to remove the words 'habeas corpus' from the spellchecker and replace them with cyberterrorist and narcoterrorist.

YRO? Some things are just bigger and more important than the MS vs Geeks boondoggle.

This might turn out to be GOOD for OOo

[Chordonblue]

Why? Because OOo has direct Wordperfect importing now. Between this, basic Flash and PDF support, you have a real winner. Who says you can't have both? I can see this being installed alongside both Office and WP installs just for the conversion tools if nothing else and that can only be a good thing.

I of course only use OOo 2.0 Beta. What's good for the rest of the school here is good enough for me.

frankly I alwasys perferred it...

[CaptainPinko]

I always perferred WP over Office or OO.org. The fact that is home-grown makes it even better. Too bad last time I checked they didn't make a Linux product. Wine support seems nil and so is CrossOver Office. http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Co rel3/Products/Display&pid=1047023967401&cid=104702 3967158

To All Those Who Think Corel Is Canadian

[Dystopian Rebel]

Corel has been a US company for two years now.

Re:To All Those Who Think Corel Is Canadian

[adsl]

Hmm that's interesting. I didn't know they were bought out. Thanks.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[shufler]

I hear from users that WP is better to use, but personally I could care less. Office is just plain less trouble to support, and most things Lusers want to do is stupid anyway. Psst... you are on the clock to work, not to play.

Sweet jumping Jesus! I would hate to have you as my System Administrator. As you said -- the USERS like WP better. Not because they can play, but because they LIKE IT BETTER. Just because you don't like the way the software is supported shouldn't be the final reason for not picking the software. The money saved by having the USERS more productive would be more than enough to pay for the support contract.

I should point out that Microsoft has support contracts for Office too. A lot of the time the free information you can find in the MSDN or online somewhere won't solve your problem. If you need to pay in the end anyways, why not use the software the USERS prefer?

Holy shit, where do you work? I'll gladly take your job and save that company time, money, and probably idiotic commentary from you.

not a blip

[Triumph The Insult C]

it's just another $13.2 million MS will have to fork over when they finally decide to buy corel

Thanks for the correction

[mrluisp]

I'm sure I was missing something. It sounded too funny to be true.

Nothing new with this

[ayelvington]

Justice has used Word Perfect for ages. This is probably a contract renewal...

Discussion still has a purpose

[tepples]

If you want the government to save tax payer money, call your senator and ask him/her to support and use an open source alternative. Posting your comments here will not go very far.

Posting comments here is a good way to gather one's thoughts before writing the letter to one's senators or making a phone call.

Re:Discussion still has a purpose

[indifferent children]

And we'll even criticize your grammar and spelling, so that you don't look like a total idiot when your senator (or their aide) reads your letter.

aka

and wheel even critisize you're grammer and sp so you dnt look like a total ID10T when you're senator (or there aid) reads you're letter

Not part of the solution, you are the problem.

[bayerwerke]

You may have reversed the cause and effect relationship. Don't teach how to use Word and Excel, teach how to use a word processor and spreadsheet. The software brands are not all that different and the school's job is not to create future Microsoft apologists, I think it has something to do with that student learning thing.

Re:WP is just as proprietary and just as closed

[The Cisco Kid]

Not necesarrily. Perhaps this will help leverage an open format for 'editable document' exchange.

AIUI, it was entirely about features

[tepples]

Is this deal about features? No.

Many DOJ employees are attorneys, and attorneys have long preferred the features of WordPerfect over those of Microsoft Word. For one thing, WordPerfect footnotes work.

Licensing

[bayerwerke]

The last time I read a WordPerfect Suite EULA it said I could install it at work and at home. I think Office 'requires' a license for each computer and an additional one for every user of that computer.

Ummmm

[cmacb]

"Has sanity finally set in, or is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?"

I'd guess blip.

How to do "reveal codes" in Microsoft Word

[tepples]

I've often thought that Word would benefit from a 'Reveal Codes' option (never mind the obvious 'reveal file format' jokes)

Open your Microsoft Word document. Save as RTF. Open in notepad, emacs, or any other plain text editor. Discover that the codes have been revealed. Sure, it's not as handy as the "Reveal HTML" button in (say) Nvu, but at least Microsoft can claim it as a bullet point.

unzip and vi

[tepples]

Now if only someone could get Reveal Codes into OpenOffice.org ...

IIRC, OpenOffice.org documents are zipfiles containing XML of various DTDs. Open the XML file in notepad or emacs or any of the other 6 editors you have installed to see all the codes you want.

less than meets the eye

[westlake]

Corel is initially charging the government $40 per copy to upgrade from an earlier WordPerfect version to its newest software, the government said.

This isn't a migration from Microsoft Office, but simply a discounted upgrade of Word Perfect.

BS! BS! BS!!! God, get up-to-date people

[ashitaka]

Results of last Lawnet (now ILTA) Technology Survey:

Primary Word Processor:

2004: Word 91% WordPerfect 9%
2003: Word 86% WordPerfect 13%
2001: Word 79% WordPerfect 20%

Re:BS! BS! BS!!! God, get up-to-date people

[ScytheBlade1]

I see something rather whack with what you've said here. Namely how the first two add up to 99%, and the last one adds up to 100%.

I somehow doubt that 100% of the "Lawnet" members use either Word or Wordperfect, and nothing else.

Re:BS! BS! BS!!! God, get up-to-date people

[ashitaka]

That 1% might be OO. This is from a question that compared only Word and Wordperfect use and illustrated the rapid decline in Wordperfect use amongst law firms in the past three years. It will be interesting to see if that 1% disparity grows in coming years.

The survey is verbatim from the International Legal Technology Association that represents the majority of law firms in North America. The survey covers all aspects of technology use, not just Word Processors and is the most accurate source of technology trends in the legal profession.

We are very typical of the standard mid-size firm these days (65 lawyers):

- We stopped using Wordperfect as our primary word processor in 2000.
- We finally got rid of WP completely just this past year after we upgraded our accounting system.
- Law firms hang onto technology for a very long time and don't change that often, thus the impression that lawyers like WordPerfect when the actuality is that a lot of firms just haven't gotten around to upgrading.
- Our phone system is 20 years old (ROLM) and the partnership still isn't convinced of the need to change as the phones work fine and they don't need any of the fancy stuff like caller id. (let alone integrated messaging)
- We use workstations for five years instead of the industry typical three.

What? Non-US Software?

[Snommis]

I find this interesting, because I work for the US Navy as a tech rep. I was developing some test equipment, and needed an app to grab RS-232 data. After much research, I chose software made by a small Canadian company, and requested money to buy a copy.

My request for a whopping $35 was denied, and I was told to find a US company that made the same thing. I wrote a full page report detailing my research and why this was the best answer, only to be denied again.

Eventually, I broke out Python wrote an app myself. I think it cost about 10x what a site license would've cost.

Re:What? Non-US Software?

[fozzmeister]

I actually find it quite bizarre the anti, don't buy from another country. In the UK the gov buys from whoever is cheapest because there is a belief that it cuts taxes (or rather they don't want to be seen as spending more than they have to).

Of course the economics people know this if way fucked up and it makes far more sense to buy from your own country but it has to be measured against sanity too.

BAE (British Aerospace) seems to be perpetually at the point of cutting loads of jobs because they are forced to compete with the US (and other) companies 100%.

standard

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=standard

While the "excellence" is debatable, the fact that .doc is a standard isn't.

Why no OpenOffice?

[beamin]

Because the Bushista regime isn't open about ANYTHING.

Sanity? Sadly not.

[Eric Smith]

If sanity prevailed, they'd use OpenOffice or other free software. And Linux or BSD.

Sigh.

I could give them a better deal for $ 0.2 mio...

[j.leidner]

According to the article, the deal is worth up to $13.2 million over five years for Ontario-based Corel.

I could give them a better deal (only $ 0.2 mio): $ 0.2 mio. worth of OpenOffice 1.1 CDs and a single free advice. ;-)

--
Internet search per SMS: Nuggets

Authority

[tepples]

From Merriam-Webster: something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example [...] I do not see reference to IEEE, ISO, ECMA, or any other "standards body" in these definitions.

IEEE, ISO, and ECMA are "authority" on several issues. W3C is "authority" on web protocols. And as for consent, do you think that somebody sent a .doc file has a practical choice?

This is a blip

[speters]

DOJ, like many law firms, have been using WordPerfect for a very long time. In fact, most of the original rulings against Microsoft in 1999 were all written on WordPerfect. My guess is that the large number of templates for legal documents influenced this decision.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[BobPaul]

If you need to pay in the end anyways, why not use the software the USERS prefer?

I'm not sure what users would prefered WordPerfect... Sure, down with microsoft and all, but it's a poor program. Go with OO.o or Abi Word or something that doesn't explode when you put an MS Word file into it (or tell you adjective forms of common nouns are mispelled, even though they're obviously found on dictionary.com)

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[Bronster]

Go with OO.o or Abi Word or something that doesn't explode when you put an MS Word file into it

And here we see the problems - users of Wordperfect who are only transferring files to other users of Wordperfect don't need to put MS Word files in - indeed that fact that they can't allows them (if powerful enough) to put pressure on others to use word processing power that plays well with Wordperfect instead.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[tardlet]

I can't say that I've had users prefer on over the other. However, I must agree with the original poster that Office is much easier to support. Distributing it is extremely simple even in a large organization. Support calls are minimal. And I can honestly say that I've never run across an issue that couldn't be answered with a Google search or a trip to Experts Exchange. As much crap as we give Microsoft for making their products so enmeshed, I think the level of integration between Windows (including server products) and Office actually makes an administrator's job much easier. I love Linux as much as anyone here. The day that a Linux distrib and Office suite marriage is as easy to deal with as Windows/Office, I'll be a happy man. But from what I can see, that is still a good ways off.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[mdwstmusik]

I hear from users that WP is better to use, but personally I could care less. Office is just plain less trouble to support, and most things Lusers want to do is stupid anyway. Psst... you are on the clock to work, not to play.

Funny. In every system analysis & design class I've taken, I've been told that a good system is based on USER requirements, not lazy tech support toady requirements.

Price, Not Format

[ThisIsFred]

Well, I guess this is good for Corel. Nice to see their past investments in IP may yet pay off. Unfortunately it appears that this decision is driven by cost and backward compatibility. I'm not in the "anything but MS Office" crowd, unless we're only talking about potential security problems. There are some solutions I like better than others.

The primary concern should really be format. If Agency X is smart, they'd pick a standard format for each type of document they need to store. Changing back-up media is one thing, but imagine changing document formats so the data remains usable in the future. Let's say Agency X's document needs are met by Richtext format (just for an example, okay?). The format happens to have broad support, and even if that support evaporates in 10 years, it's still intelligible enough to write a converter without having the format spec spelled out.

Then the choices become: Which word processors a) don't crash all the time, b) run on their computers, c) are affordable, and d) can read/write RTF. In that light, it doesn't matter which they pick. It could be MS Office for all I care, but it gives Agency X, and all the people that correspond with Agency X, a choice they otherwise would not have. Then those connected with Agency X can pick Open Office, Easy Office, Star Office, Corel Office, MS Office, or whatever meets their desired level of comfort.

Honestly, there should be an unencumbered standard. It exists with nearly every other industry, and even some types of data transfers, like those among banks. Considering the retention and security requirments of the DoJ, shouldn't they have farmed to someone to create a published, standard format? Yes, I'm sensitive to this. My employer was forced to buy hundreds of seats of Office 2000 because our oversight agencies refused to take the extra steps to save their documents in a more common format. Basically, they screwed us and our taxpayers.

Now I will pick on TFA, because it deserves picking:

The new purchase agreement, announced Monday, makes the latest version of Corel's WordPerfect Office software available to more than 50,000 lawyers and other Justice employees... illustrates that Microsoft, the world's largest software company, still faces pockets of intense competition in the industry it dominates....Microsoft sold $2.8 billion worth of its Office software programs in the final three months of 2004.

If, for the sake of argument, we say that each of those MSO copies were full retail at $500, that's about 5.6 million copies sold for just three quarters of one fiscal year. So less than one per cent of the sales volume is "intense" competition? That sales volume estimate is very conservative, considering that Microsoft most likely rakes in the bucks from volume license agreements.

Corel is initially charging the government $40 per copy to upgrade from an earlier WordPerfect version to its newest software, the government said.

The author is attempting to create some sort of journalistic drama here, lacing his piece with references to the anti-trust case. Here in the middle we find this gem. Sorry, there's no message being sent to Redmond. The DoJ's choice was obviously influenced by the fact that they have an enormous body of documents that is already stored in WP format.

The Justice Department will make WordPerfect software available to more than 20 organizations inside the agency...

Well, that's a nice gesture. A better decision would allow those 20 organizations to pick their own office suite.

O'Donovan said U.S. courts require all electronic filings to be submitted as WordPerfect documents, and Justice has thousands of programmed shortcuts designed to work with WordPerfect.

I'm not sure what this means. But how is this any different than MS Office? You still have to use a proprietary format

US Supreme Court Uses WordPerfect

[zillyorg]

Has sanity finally set in, or is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?
Neither. The legal community uses WordPerfect because the standard was set by the US Supreme Court which uses WordPerfect exclusively and issues all of its decisions in WordPerfect. Most of the US State Supreme Courts have followed suit. The lawyers just want to use what the courts use.

Courts require filings in PDF, not WPD

[guanxi]

From the article:

U.S. courts require all electronic filings to be submitted as WordPerfect documents

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.

Corel Is A US Company!

[Dystopian Rebel]

Pardon my quoting myself, but it is true. And I am so rarely, rarely right. :o)

Attitude

[bezuwork's friend]

the biggest objection that I've received when suggesting OSS has been "If we reduce our licensing costs, they'll cut our budget for next year!?"

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.

Re:Attitude

[Ogerman]

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.

There's a really obvious possibility that you folks are missing. What if the DOJ had instead used that $13.2mil over 5 years to contract with Sun/OpenOffice.org to hire a bunch of top programmers and perfect OpenOffice. Same budget, but much better outcome for themselves and for society. Do you realize how tragic it is every time a deal like this goes down? Going with WP instead of MS is better than nothing, but it's a major lost opportunity to move the entire Open Source movement forward. All we need is for one company / government to make a significant contribution into OpenOffice development and the MS Office monopoly will come crumbling down in a matter of a couple years.

Re:Attitude

[mdwstmusik]

I agree. Unfortunately, I can only suggest solutions. I don't have the authority to make the purchasing decisions. The good news is, 'Windows' with it's tremendous stability and security (sarcasm) has given me the opportunity to introduce Linux into our server mix. When I started here, we had a recently out-of-warranty Dell server that the previous support contractor had been told, by Dell, could not be fixed and should be replaced because it kept crashing and loosing it's entire configuration. I asked if I could take a look at it, installed Linux, configured some services that were desired, but not currently offered. The machine hasn't crashed once in the 6 months since. Now, in order to offer those same services on a 'Windows' platform, we would be required to go OVER budget.

Oh well, I guess we'll have to continue to offer those services running Linux on that $9,000 gold plated Dell server that was in the dumpster. Maybe we could use the money that we saved on licenses to purchase a couple new servers?

Additionally, after nearly 3 month's of me stating that I believed that our Exchange server had been compromised and not having the authority to do much about it because we were still under a contract with the previous 'support' company, our domain was blacklisted. Since then, my suggestions have been given a little more consideration. I'm now in the process of configuring a (hopefully) replacement server using Postfix, ClamAV and SpamAssassin.

Hooray for Microsoft!

Sounds like someone could get rich...

[leonbrooks]

...by bidding OpenOffice at USD$25 a seat.

Re:WP is just as proprietary and just as closed

[stratjakt]

Or perhaps this could be another layer of red tape and bullshit when dealing with the feds (which I have to do as a contractor).

Sorry to sound pessimistic, but I think my scenario is more plausible based purely on experience.

Paraphrased from "Marketplace" on NPR

[enthused i swear]

"When asked whether the ten year long anti-trust suit had anything to do with choosing Corel's software, the Department of Justice spokeswoman- and I am paraphrasing here- replied 'Uh, yea.'"

Thought that was quite humorous.

Buy everyone one of these instead...

[leonbrooks]

...(link) and I don't think you'll be getting many complaints.

In Oz, one of the littlies costs about as much as a copy of XP Pro, plus MS Office, plus Adobe Distiller, plus the per-seat amortised cost of an MS Exchange server.

If you can justify The GIMP as a replacement for PhotoShop, PostgreSQL as a replacement for MS SQL Server, and a few other items along those lines, you can probably contra those costs against the biggest one - or at least, one of those for everyone you really need to impress, and one of the next one down for everybody else. (-: And two of the big ones for the development team (that's you). :-)

Corel is Canadian, but its parent co. is American

[HughJJorgan]

Corel was taken over by Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, in 2003. So the profits from that deal will be coming right back across the border (and I don't mean Taco Bell).

r: why not openoffice?

[0BoDy]

uh. . becuase it sucks. a lot.

I use LInux as My primary sdesktop, and windows when I have to. . . but one of those have to's is just that there isn't a complete app for linux that can handle my document needs. Openoffice works like a copy of a copy, developed too quickly by too few people with too little planning, and without really paying any attention to how it should have been done. OO.o feels like 90% of development time was spent tweaking the interface so it would be identical to Office, and 10% of the time was actually spent doing th development. That's retarded. I think that Mozilla's team is the only group I've seen that has any hope of developing a really good cross-platform app to do that kid of document processing. I really appreciate all the work done on OO.o but it's not going to last, it's disgraceful, and I'll aplaud when someone comes along (like abiword, and gnumeric) to completely destroy the marketshare it's developed in the linux community.

There are good apps, and there are mediocre apps. most linux apps are of the former and it's sad that the mainstream Word Processor is of the latter. [/rant]

Re:Hahaha - incorrect

[diogenes57]

100% private eh?

Madam, what you are is clear...

[jbn-o]

I see a critical difference between the open source and free software philosophies -- for the open source movement these "alternative sources of software" you talk about include doing government work in proprietary software using proprietary formats (this has obvious short and long-term adverse impact for citizens who want to read government documents; even the state of Massachusetts recognized this before their caving into Microsoft, or revealing the real purpose of the so-called "open formats" project, depending on which way one looks at it).

This is because the open source movement message focuses on things software proprietors can cater to in some way -- fewer bugs, faster development, lower costs, and leveraging talented developers worldwide -- all issues constructed from the very narrow frame of debate businesses talk about. These are not bad things in themselves but they don't speak to a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify software anytime for any reason.

So long as software freedom isn't a part of the debate, users will be encouraged to choose one software proprietor over another. The issue here is not how many dollars the government can save (the main issue many /. posters are examining), the issue is what the government gets for the money it spends. Choosing one master over another is not freedom.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[earthforce_1]

As you are being wheeled into the operating room you notice the surgeon examining the instruments with which his about to work on you. You are horrified to notice that he is wielding a mixed assortment of hand carpentry tools.

"Apologies" he says - "these are not the tools I wanted. But I was told by the administrator they are much easier to maintain and they do save the hospital a lot of money. I shall make do as best as I can..."

Wow, this is a suprise!

[Stormy Dragon]

Who knew they were still making WordPerfect...

Re:What?

[mibus]

Why are we supposed to rejoice when a part of the federal government leaves one commercial package for another commercial package?

Because they clearly realise that they have choice in the matter. That they acknowledge that alternatives exists, and critically evaluate the alternatives, is the most important thing here - not what software they ended up with.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[BobPaul]

users of Wordperfect who are only transferring files to other users of Wordperfect don't need to put MS Word files in

BUT, if you're transfering you're entire business (or branch of the government) from MS Word to something else it would be really, really nice if all of your old MS Word files opened without a hitch. This has not been my experience with the WordPerfect Dell put on my machine a year and a half ago... Having the ability to open MS Office files natively (such as with OO.o/StarOffice) would certainly help the transition. WordPerfect opening Word files isn't much better than saving Word Docs to RTF first and them opening them with something... quite a bit is lost.

Re:Michael's gone...

[Bill Dog]

Has sanity finally set in, or...

michael always ended his writeups with a troll. Could michael be back, now as "timothy"?

preferred by scientists and mathematicians

[clymere]

my mother is a Physics Prof., and has overwhelmingly preferred Word Perfect for years. She says all of her colleagues do as well, with the exception of the one or two geeks who run linux and use LaTeX.

Her reason is simple: the equation editor. Apparently its far superior to MS Office's. I believe theres other things she lieks as well, but thats always been the main one.

Of course she could try and learn LaTeX and probably have an even easier time...she had me install it for her. But the learning curve is much easier with WP, and her job is to teach Physics, not to be a computer geek :)

Not really suprising.

[jellomizer]

These are organizations that have a lot of lawyers and Lawyers like word perfect. Word Perfect is actually a very good word processor a lot better then word, IMO. But working in IT with NY State Agencies, I can see why Word Perfect is not that popular. It is not optimized for the OS nor designed to be multi platform. Thus creates problems with Windows Networks that actually pretend that they have security in place. (Roaming Profiles with permissions) Word Perfect will load and run but not everything. Thus creating a servicing nightmare. "Where my Spell Check why isn't GramTech working." Basically Word Perfect just wasn't up to the plate in making a product that works good in windows. I am not going to blame Microsoft on that one the failure is all in Corell because This permission technology has been around since NT(I dont know 3 or 4 at least NT 4). It was designed to run on Microsofts Crap OS's Windows 95, 98, and My God! ME. So as far when the program is running correctly it is a great product but as for being an IT Manager and wanting to support Word Perfect I would rather have people use Word.

Is OpenOffice too cheap for them?

[ZehFernando]

Have they even considered OpenOffice and their open formats? They could save all that money in buying software and spend it on training and deployment (or even contributing to the project). Or trivial stuff like, you know, medicare.

could you be any MORE pedantic?

[Stu Charlton]

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.

Stuck in the past

[grolaw]

WP is the DOJ choice by tradition - not any other reason. Most US District Courts require Jury Instructions submitted in WP format on 3.5" floppies....

This has been the case since 1987. We are talking entrenched technology nothing else.

Out of touch with reality

[Microsoft Minion]

I feel sorry for all those poor saps stuck with the Corel suite. Why would I want to use anything other than the MS Office suite, when 99.9% of my customers use it. Most of the end users I meet, have no clue or desire how their computers operate. They just want it to work. For most users, (the majority of people) if you don't stick with the standard, (i.e. Microsoft) they are totally lost. Yes you may spend more money up front, however the headaches you alleviate are worth it. I am not trolling. In my 20+ years of IT experience, sticking to the 'middle of the road' is always the best course of action. I have no problem with Linux, OSS, or alternative software, just don't force it on the mainstream public.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What short memories you all have?

[crovira]

The problem with Word's file format is that it's not a file format. Its a memory snapshot and includes whatever cruff was in RAM at the time.

Word doesn't clean the space so you get all kinds of things in there. Like old documents. Other people's documents. Stuff that constitutes serious breach of client confidentiality.

Lawyers use WordPerfect because they HAVE to.

Don't you remember the postings here about SCO's documents being full of versions of their printed texts?

Re:WP is just as proprietary and just as closed

[The Cisco Kid]

But just perhaps, once the DOJ and the MS-using parts of the govt realize how much of a PIA it is to interchange stuff between the two, they will realize why MS is able to maintain their illegal monopoly, and perhaps get it in their head to finally break it.

MS wanted $150, Corel wanted $40(US) per copy

[Anonymous Coward]

and OpenOffice costs what?

Not So Much Anymore was Re:Damn Lawyers

[RexCelestis]

My day job tracks law firms that have made the switch from WP to Word. We currently figure 80 of the top 100 law firms have gone over to some version of Word. The firms that haven't are certainly considering it, or living in a situation we refer to as the "Dual Shop of Horrors."

Firms give a number of reason for making the switch:

• Client demand. Coporate customers almost universally use Word.
• Interaction with the most popular document management systems. The most recent versions of many DMS' no longer function with WordPerfect
• Better technical support. Corel's support is absolutely terrible.
• Greater stabilty. WordPerfect has had serious memory and other issues since version 8
• A wide variety of third party applications to assist with document repurposing, assembly, electronic filing, etc.
• Growing use of Word by incoming lawyers
• A better platform and methodology for the multiple destinations of a document. It's a very different word processor than WordPerfect, but the thought is that a skilled user can do much more with it

This being said, I did recently get accosted by a young attorney who swore WP 5.1 was the ultimate word processor. He never understood why his firm switched. Of course, that firm is no longer in business.

Re:What?

[drinkypoo]

I'm sorry, but what makes you think they even considered OO.o? Even if they DID do a study to determine if IT would meet their needs, it could have been a smokescreen to cover up the fact that they had no intention of implementing it.

Sorry, but I just can't be happy when instead of supporting software that benefits us all, they choose to go with a closed package that benefits only one company.

Re:And the tech support began to weep

[srussell]

Psst... you are on the clock to work, not to play.

...
Holy shit, where do you work? I'll gladly take your job and save that company time, money, and probably idiotic commentary from you.

A-fricken-men. This guy is a moron, evidenced by the fact that he, too, is "on the clock to work, not to play." It is his job to support the users; it isn't his job to make them use crappy software just so he can sit around jerking off on company time. It sounds like he's lazy, on top of stupid.

Lawyers prefer WordPerfect

[exhilaration]

WordPerfect has always been prefered by lawyers because WordPerfect has tailored its software for them. Google WordPerfect Legal Edition.

Re:Lawyers prefer WordPerfect

[rikkards]

True but for some reason they had decided to have 1 legal copy of Wordperfect 9 (I think or was it 10) on 60 workstations

de facto

[CarrionBird]

.doc is the de facto standard. And you are an pedantic troll. It's very simple.

Re:de facto

[Paradise Pete]

Had he said de facto I'd have agreed. And had he not trotted out the dictionary entry for a different notion that just happens to sound the same, then I'd have not posted. If you don't care about the meaning of words that's ok by me. But for you to change it from "the standard" to "de facto standard" and then call me pedantic is intellectually dishonest. And as for trolling, I'd have rather you hadn't posted, so that would make it more of an anti-troll. And if I may conclude by actually being pedantic, troll is a verb.

Re:de facto

[CarrionBird]

It is "the standard" for many companies and other groups. It is reasonable for someone who is not looking to be a asswipe to assume that the writer meant a de facto standard, espically in light of the lack of an conflicting "official" standard for the subject.

Re:de facto

[Paradise Pete]

It is reasonable for someone who is not looking to be a asswipe to assume that the writer meant a de facto standard

Which of course is what I did. It was when he quoted a dictionary that I pointed out that the definition he was citing was inappropriate to the words he'd used, and was challenged on (by some other poster, not me).
It was his imprecision dressed up as something precise that I was objecting to.

Re:Hahaha - incorrect

[Anonymous Bullard]

MS sold their 20%+ holdings to Vector which is owned by MS co-founder Paul Allen and staffed by executives from MS and other firms which were involved in "advising" Corel (supposedly neutrally, of course) to dump the Linux strategy and later to sell out to Vector at bottom prices. Corel execs decided to collude with the Vector/MS goons, and Corel's chairman James Baillie's law firm even represented Vector against the shareholders! Talk about serving your shareholders' best interest... They rammed the takeover deal through by manipulating the voting procedures and despite having the approval of only a quarter of the shares. The Corel execs even used their share options for the first time in order to scrape together quorum, while most shareholders didn't even know about the vote until it was too late!

Corel may now be nominally private but it sure ain't giving MS anything but a show competition since the takeover.

## Mod parent up ##

[zooblethorpe]

There's a really obvious possibility that you folks are missing. What if the DOJ had instead used that $13.2mil over 5 years to contract with Sun/OpenOffice.org to hire a bunch of top programmers and perfect OpenOffice. Same budget, but much better outcome for themselves and for society.

Precisely! Instead of spending gobs of money to basically tread water (by buying one static software package), a government could spend the same amount of money to contract for improvements to existing, functional, useful FOSS software (ongoing improvements), thus benefiting both themselves (better software, same budgets) and their citizenry at large (better software). Any silliness about "but that would be using MY tax dollars to support something that's free, that's communist!" etc. is simply that -- silliness -- for how is spending public funds on FOSS any worse than spending those same funds on (potentially) overpriced proprietary software? At least with FOSS, you know the code inside and out, and short of a compromised compiler, you know you've got no back doors. If I remember rightly, that's part of the Chinese government's argument against using proprietary software; this prompted MS to let them see (some of) its code.

Do you realize how tragic it is every time a deal like this goes down? Going with WP instead of MS is better than nothing, but it's a major lost opportunity to move the entire Open Source movement forward.

Thank goodness Munich has some balls. It seems some other governments are also wising up to FOSS benefits. Here's to more public initiatives to use FOSS!

Re:What?

[zooblethorpe]

i find it very difficult to see where WP would be far superior to OpenOffice.

In case you've missed out, you might want to take note that folks in the legal profession have very specific requirements vis-a-vis word count, to the extent that there have been legal snafus caused by incomplete word count functionality in MS Word (link courtesy this post by Animaether).

Given that OOo's word count has had numerous problems, apparently even in the v2.0 beta,, and given how fundamentally important an accurate and simple word count is in so many real-world applications (legal, scientific, academic, business, yada yada), I can see quite easily how OOo would be kept out of the running.

Not meaning to piss on your parade, but OOo's just not there yet. I love it -- it's free, it's functional, but it's also "almost" -- it's soooo close to being what people need, but close isn't good enough in some areas.

Published spec vs. no published spec

[tepples]

It is reasonable for someone who is not looking to be a asswipe to assume that the writer meant a de facto standard, espically in light of the lack of an conflicting "official" standard for the subject.

In my estimation of the word "standard", an official standard from a government-recognized standards body beats or is tied with a de facto standard with a published spec, and a de facto standard with a published spec trumps a de facto standard without a published spec. Here, a LaTeX document or a document with a widely used XML DTD would look more like a "standard" to me than the WordPerfect or Microsoft Word binary document format.