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Use of Open Source Software in Legal Firms?
jhenkins asks: "This is a question to all of the legal beagles out there, especially practicing lawyers and advocates. Normally there are quite a number of restrictions posed on law professionals with regards to file formats by courts etc, but I would like to know whether there are some success stories out there. It would be very interesting to get some opinions in this field, because where I come from (South Africa) this is an almost *total* M$ stronghold. The only area where I saw a really big score for Open Source is the adoption of things like Kolab for groupware and scheduling. So, do you use Open Source software in your line of work? If you do, please let me know what you use and for which purpose (things like document management, knowledge bases, word processing et al). Thanks!"
In any case, in the US, the legal world is the last huge stronghold of WordPerfect, due partly to inertia but also to the fact that its word count apparently is more accurate than Word's.
You work at a LAW FIRM who (presumably) after reading Microsoft's EULA has come to the conclusion that Microsoft can be held accountable?
What law firm is this? Just so I never make the mistake of using them...
(ok, that was harsh but you get my point)
Finkployd
I don't get your logic... who can be held accountable for FOSS?
You say right now Microsoft can be held accountable for their software? I don't believe that. When have we seen a major lawsuit because of security holes in Microsoft software? In fact, when have we seen lawsuits because of security holes in any software, proprietary or open source?
You say you've been very proactive with your boxes. Then that answers your question on accountability. You manage them, so you're accountable. If you outsourced your service to Red Hat, they would be held accountable. If Microsoft was the one that deployed and manages your IT setup, they would be held accountable.
What's up with responsibility and accountability these days? Do we always have to blame others rather than ourselves?
Once again, we're seeing ManagementThink in action. Us techies tend to think of support in information-gathering terms, while management tends to think in business-entity terms. While we tend to look for whatever information is needed to keep things working, management tends to look for some business entity to take responsibility for it. Actually being able to win a legal case against this entity in case things go wrong isn't in view so much as the mere fact that you have some viable business entity put into the 'responsible for this technology' slot.
Microsoft understands this. When they harp on the 'where will you get support' issue, note that they don't really focus on whether or not their support is effective, just on that fact that they're a business that a manager can point to as filling the slot. Having someone to fill in the slot is so comforting to management that they tend to ignore the fact that Microsoft's licensing pretty well precludes being able to sue when things go wrong (although I wonder how much you'd be able to shake up management's confidence by making comments along the line of "Lemme get this straight. You actually think it's good policy to bet our business on being able to beat Microsoft in a lawsuit?"