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U.S. Justice Dept. Chooses Corel over Microsoft
peg0cjs writes "The Justice Department, which challenged Microsoft Corp. in courtrooms for nearly a decade over antitrust violations, will pay more than $2 million each year to buy business software from Corel Corp, according to this article from CANOE. 'The Justice Department will make WordPerfect software available to more than 20 organizations inside the agency, but not the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration, which use Microsoft's Office business software exclusively, said Mary Aileen O'Donovan, a program manager in the Justice Management Division.' According to the article, the deal is worth up to $13.2 million over five years for Ontario-based Corel. Has sanity finally set in, or is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?"
A blip? I dunno, seems when the Roman Empire began to crumble it started somewhere, in some little way. Don't discount Corel too quickly and don't underestimate the power of saving a few dollars by a goverment sorely in need of cost cutting. If these tools work well, the next round may embrace FBI and DEA. you have the right to alternative sources of software
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's probably the lawyers' fault. For some reason a lot of them prefer Word Perfect.
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
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?
Does this mean they'll spend 0.1% less on Microsoft software each year?
is that most of the Homeland Insecurity guys like Country music instead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As a former corel employee !2001 they had posters all over HQ talking about how the DOJ and Microsofts Own lawyers in the antitrust thing used WPO, as WP docs are pretty much the standard de jure ;)
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly
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.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
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?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
How about no-one buys anything for any amount and just uses Open Office.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
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.
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.
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.
No, someone in purchasing just happened to find something cheaper that could get the job done.
Move along, nothing to see here. (as usual)
- Think for yourself, question authority.-
but not the Drug Enforcement Administration, which use Microsoft's Office business software exclusively
Hmmm... I wonder what they're smoking...
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Blip!
Jonathanjk.com
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.
:D
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!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
$13.2 million? that's like a penny to Microsoft.
"What's a quarter?"
-Bill Gates on Family Guy
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".
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.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?c ourt=7th&navby=case&no=991754A
You have not been keeping up with the news. Microsoft sold all their Corel shares a few years ago (which, by the way, were a special non-voting kind so they had no say in how Corel ran their business). Now Corel is 100% private, owned by San Francisco venture capitalists Vector Capital.
Nope, MS sold their shares a few years ago. Corel is private now, owned by Vector Capital of san francisco.
Note MS's Corel shares were a special non-voting kind, which means they had no say in Corel's decision to exit the linux business.
No sanity there...
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So what happens 100 years from now when my grandchildren want to review some of these documents?
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.
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.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
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).
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
XP SP2 already does harmfully affect WordPerfect Suite. You can read more about it at microsoft.com.
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.
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...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
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.
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
While the "excellence" is debatable, the fact that .doc is a standard isn't.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
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.
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.
...by bidding OpenOffice at USD$25 a seat.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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..."
My rights don't need management.
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.
The poster he responded to said:
You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.
So he proceeded to define it. "STANDARD" doesn't mean "standards group".
In any case, MS word is THE STANDARD word processing format across the world. De facto. There is no de jure standard. So it is The Standard. It sucks, you can hate it, but it's reality. Perhaps some day enough people will want to change that. Apparently not today.
-Stu
.doc is the de facto standard. And you are an pedantic troll. It's very simple.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's