I use Open Office every day to practice law and will never go back to MS Word or WordPerfect.
The notion that most users don't follow Mr. Stallman's lead and fix their own bugs is not a flawed assumption. Many citizens are not as literate or educated as they could be. That's not an argument for illiteracy.
I don't think the fact that I tend to think like a consumer instead of a coder is something to celebrate. Its a reason for me to increase my code literacy.
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh. . . .
I think you'd be right except Episode IV wasn't just a space movie that became a blockbuster. It was the space movie that made blockbusters feasible. It earned so much at the box office, that it mainstreamed the genre of science fiction.
All the powers of unix are pressed into struggle to exorcise this spectre: GNU and BSD; Apple and Linux; hackers and crackers; script kiddies and my grandmother who can't even use an aol client and wishes she could have her old typewriter back.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as open source by its opponents in Richmond?
It is high time that open source advocates openly publish their views and their aims and meet this nursery tale of open source with a party manifesto.
You're assuming that knowing a particular version of Windows is enough to keep an office with a unique cluster of proprietary applications running. That's an expensively flawed assumption.
The problem I encountered was in the interaction --- or lack thereof rather --- between the different generations of Microsoft products and other proprietary vendors.
Every has professional has a cluster of software applications needed to do work. Lawyers use software for case management, bookkeeping, document generation, invoicing, timekeeping and calendaring to name a few. One can't be an expert in just one, and people tend not to be an expert in all of them. What you do manage to learn has an artificial shelf-life.
All of that software comes from vendors hellbent on keeping trade secrets. Tracking down bugs is a lot harder without shared knowledge or source code. I'm told by coders, that's the reality.
Open Office and linux promise a stop to the extra costs. I will not be buying a copy of Vista --- except maybe the gaming edition.
I'm a non-coder professional who recently moved my office desktop to linux from Windows XP. (i.e. I don't know much about much when it comes to the mysterious boxes my office needs to do its thing.) I was able to madk the change by installing Open Office on Windows and practicing with it.
After I was comfortable with it and had moved over all of my many, many forms and other documents needed to run my office, I moved the rest of the way to linux. I chose Mandriva with a Gnome desktop. Though I have not found an open source counterpart for every proprietary application I used before, with Open Office I could make it work.
Why move to a linux desktop? Lots of reasons, but, at the top, I guess it felt to me that every time I turned around, another sales rep was billing me for another upgrade or another license.
If it wasn't that type of bill, it was a bill from technical support to fix a problem that did not exist before I made some vendor-mandated change to my office system. My old documents don't open any more. The formatted is messed up. That feature I need so much has been moved. Etc.
I'm embarrassed by how much money I spent for a technical support providers that ended up talking on the phone with the technical support provider of another vendor. To my mind, that's a ridiculous situation that is largely remedied by the open source approach.
It has been a long, steep hill to be sure. I am never going to look back though.
There is a lot more to say on this subject, but these reasons are at the top of my list.
I switched my law office to open office last year and just finished switching the rest of the way to linux earlier this year. Its gone fine. It may be getting easier to make the switch.
I know its less expensive now that I've switched. I can't wait to not buy Vista.
Remedies prescribed by doctors can be generalized, but the profession does not do that anymore. Lawyers and realtors have forms which anyone can get and try to do their own work, but its not usually a good idea.
I've wondered for a *long* time why coders do not prefer a build-it model to servicing mass-produced proprietary code.
The profession of coding would be stronger as a profession if coders kept the source open and sold time to build individuals what they needed. There is little danger that non-coders will suddenly wean themselves from the need to hire coders just because the source is available.
Doctors generally don't keep their medical knowledge secret to make money. They share knowledge and concentrate on practicing.
I've talked with friends and my brother about this very project. I became used to using Amicus Attorney (similar to PC Law) but have now gone cold turkey off of all proprietary code except XP. I've vowed to use pen and legal pad until I can find open source code that works better.
I can't tell you how badly I miss being able to select my time, client info and activity code *one* time from pull-down menus instead of entering it all twice manually. I would happily settle for now for a format that would import easily into Quickbooks.
Thanks for this comment. There is growing interest in the open source movement among lawyers. I attended the ABA Equal Justice Conference this year, and there was one session devoted to "saving money" with software options that included a discussion of open source code. Its a start.
The Legal Services Corporation spends thousands each year on proprietary code but is actively exploring open source alternative. I would much rather that grant money went to open source coders than proprietary licenses.
Prof. Lessig has also done a lot to open eyes to the important cultural resonance of the open source movement.
Smaller offices are good places to model solutions and work out bugs. The fixes that work can then be scaled for the larger offices that are more restricted by the problems you mention.
I do believe that these interoperability problems can and will be solved. Five years ago, I couldn't tell a cpu from a computer case. I know a lot more now thanks to helpful hackers. It may take time, but it will be done.
I like the idea of lawyers getting a special icon but couldn't it be a fountain pen or a scale instead of a shark?
The lawyers that practice that way are far fewer and further in between than people think. I also believe that shark behavior does not make particularly effective lawyer behavior.
But if it was the shark or nothing I might have to reconsider since it would be really cool to get a special lawyer icon on slashdot.
The issues that arise with WordPerfect are a good example of the sort of problem that faces lawyers who need to work in heavily formatted documents.
As soon as you switch to Open Office, you need to start dealing with all of the WordPerfect attachments other lawyers send you. If its a document you need to edit and return the same day, using Open Office becomes questionable very fast.
Ditto when you go to print a label for an envelope on Open Office, and it won't line up correctly. At that point, you don't care whether the problem is caused by proprietary vendors that don't play well with others. You just need the problem fixed.
This is not a definition. All social problems end up included because the idea of a "spiritual" social problem is undefined. What does it mean to talk about a "spiritual" social problem as distinguished from a social problem that is observable? A definition needs to make distinctions rather than blur them.
And there's a bigger and older problem: what is an example of a social problem that is caused by pornography?
It doesn't add much to suggest that consumers show id so that minors are unable to purchase Playboy magazine. That's a circular definition of pornography.
I don't understand what the phrase "secular manifestations of harm" is intended to mean.
More to the point, the law generally refrains from consideration of moral questions. The law is about making society more fair. Morality is about how individuals choose to lead a good life.
The need to separate church from state arose historically because churches answer the question of how to live a good life differently from one another. When governments try to enforce a particular moral standard, the right --- and responsibility --- to an individual moral conscience is compromised.
Even the conservative majority opinion in Miller speaks in terms of community standards and whether the material at issue describes sex offensively while also lacking cultural value (e.g. aesthetic, political, scientific, etc.)
Interesting you should mention MLSA as my work with them originally inspired my own interest in open source. (I worked there for 2 years and have a connection that goes back further than that.)
They do have calendaring through the Kemp software (proprietary) which they purchase show compliance on their LSC grant. There's a lot of variation among offices as to what Kemp is used to do.
I'm not familiar with squirrel mail or the online time clock, but Firefox and Thunderbird are of course available to them when they're ready.
MLSA is poised to be a real leader on open source because they've received national recognition from LSC for their commitment to technological approaches to poverty law (video conferencing, lawhelp.org, etc.)
However, to my knowledge, MLSA and LSC (national) have spent their grant money on proprietary solutions for the most part.
The only organized effort behind using open source for poverty law that I know about is called the Open Source Initiative. It was organized at a national level and has done interesting stuff.
There's also a cool article in Clearinghouse Review about XML, but otherwise its slim pickins.
My perception is that open source is perfect for small offices --- professional offices generally --- rural or urban. I've experienced fewer compatibility issues with Open Office than with WordPerfect --- esp. after the Montana Supreme Court adopted MS Word as its standard word processing format.
I'd be really happy to find others trying to make Open Office work in a professional environment. You're probably right that its wrong of me to try and blame that on the size of the population here. It has more to do with my being a newbie.
Have you noticed much use of Open Office in professional offices in Helena?
This is great news. I use OpenOffice in my small town law practice, and I'm so happy to be liberarted from the tyranny of proprietary licensing fees. Lack of compatibility between software packages (office, accounting, case mgmt., etc.) is an even bigger problem for law offices in rural areas, like mine, who want to explore open source but lack support services.
I'm learning --- ever so slowly --- more about Linux and Samba so I can complete the office transformation some day. Its hard to find patient teachers, and tech understanding comes slowly to some of us. Its worth the effort though.
does broadband change a town to a city?
on
Broadband Bits
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article has an interesting comparison between transportation and wireless access as economic development issues. Are the two really that similar?
A highway does enable more commerce to and from an area. Are there studies that demonstrate that broadband access results in economic growth even in rural areas?
Slashdot Mirror
I use Open Office every day to practice law and will never go back to MS Word or WordPerfect.
The notion that most users don't follow Mr. Stallman's lead and fix their own bugs is not a flawed assumption. Many citizens are not as literate or educated as they could be. That's not an argument for illiteracy.
I don't think the fact that I tend to think like a consumer instead of a coder is something to celebrate. Its a reason for me to increase my code literacy.
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh. . . .
(No, its Gorey of course . . . )
Gad, this article was not interesting.
That's what I noticed. Schismatrix is one of the best sci fi books ever. And he wrote Hacker Crackdown. Come on.
Kurt Vonnegut would be on my list and . . . yes, the Baroque Cycle. That trilogy is the new Lord of the Rings but (wait for it . . . ) better.
Okay, I just meant to say its different. The Baroque Cycle is just different from Lord of the Rings.
I think you'd be right except Episode IV wasn't just a space movie that became a blockbuster. It was the space movie that made blockbusters feasible. It earned so much at the box office, that it mainstreamed the genre of science fiction.
. . . and Heavy Metal . . .
and I'm sorry but Episode IV practically invented the "summer blockbuster" for better or worse. It should be listed first.
Yeah, Redmond . . . .
Its the spectre of open source.
All the powers of unix are pressed into struggle to exorcise this spectre: GNU and BSD; Apple and Linux; hackers and crackers; script kiddies and my grandmother who can't even use an aol client and wishes she could have her old typewriter back.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as open source by its opponents in Richmond?
It is high time that open source advocates openly publish their views and their aims and meet this nursery tale of open source with a party manifesto.
. . .
Brrr . . . spooky . . . .
Happy Halloween!
You're assuming that knowing a particular version of Windows is enough to keep an office with a unique cluster of proprietary applications running. That's an expensively flawed assumption.
The problem I encountered was in the interaction --- or lack thereof rather --- between the different generations of Microsoft products and other proprietary vendors.
Every has professional has a cluster of software applications needed to do work. Lawyers use software for case management, bookkeeping, document generation, invoicing, timekeeping and calendaring to name a few. One can't be an expert in just one, and people tend not to be an expert in all of them. What you do manage to learn has an artificial shelf-life.
All of that software comes from vendors hellbent on keeping trade secrets. Tracking down bugs is a lot harder without shared knowledge or source code. I'm told by coders, that's the reality.
Open Office and linux promise a stop to the extra costs. I will not be buying a copy of Vista --- except maybe the gaming edition.
I'm a non-coder professional who recently moved my office desktop to linux from Windows XP. (i.e. I don't know much about much when it comes to the mysterious boxes my office needs to do its thing.) I was able to madk the change by installing Open Office on Windows and practicing with it.
After I was comfortable with it and had moved over all of my many, many forms and other documents needed to run my office, I moved the rest of the way to linux. I chose Mandriva with a Gnome desktop. Though I have not found an open source counterpart for every proprietary application I used before, with Open Office I could make it work.
Why move to a linux desktop? Lots of reasons, but, at the top, I guess it felt to me that every time I turned around, another sales rep was billing me for another upgrade or another license.
If it wasn't that type of bill, it was a bill from technical support to fix a problem that did not exist before I made some vendor-mandated change to my office system. My old documents don't open any more. The formatted is messed up. That feature I need so much has been moved. Etc.
I'm embarrassed by how much money I spent for a technical support providers that ended up talking on the phone with the technical support provider of another vendor. To my mind, that's a ridiculous situation that is largely remedied by the open source approach.
It has been a long, steep hill to be sure. I am never going to look back though.
There is a lot more to say on this subject, but these reasons are at the top of my list.
I switched my law office to open office last year and just finished switching the rest of the way to linux earlier this year. Its gone fine. It may be getting easier to make the switch.
I know its less expensive now that I've switched. I can't wait to not buy Vista.
Remedies prescribed by doctors can be generalized, but the profession does not do that anymore. Lawyers and realtors have forms which anyone can get and try to do their own work, but its not usually a good idea.
I've wondered for a *long* time why coders do not prefer a build-it model to servicing mass-produced proprietary code.
The profession of coding would be stronger as a profession if coders kept the source open and sold time to build individuals what they needed. There is little danger that non-coders will suddenly wean themselves from the need to hire coders just because the source is available.
Doctors generally don't keep their medical knowledge secret to make money. They share knowledge and concentrate on practicing.
I've talked with friends and my brother about this very project. I became used to using Amicus Attorney (similar to PC Law) but have now gone cold turkey off of all proprietary code except XP. I've vowed to use pen and legal pad until I can find open source code that works better.
I can't tell you how badly I miss being able to select my time, client info and activity code *one* time from pull-down menus instead of entering it all twice manually. I would happily settle for now for a format that would import easily into Quickbooks.
Thanks for this comment. There is growing interest in the open source movement among lawyers. I attended the ABA Equal Justice Conference this year, and there was one session devoted to "saving money" with software options that included a discussion of open source code. Its a start.
The Legal Services Corporation spends thousands each year on proprietary code but is actively exploring open source alternative. I would much rather that grant money went to open source coders than proprietary licenses.
Prof. Lessig has also done a lot to open eyes to the important cultural resonance of the open source movement.
Smaller offices are good places to model solutions and work out bugs. The fixes that work can then be scaled for the larger offices that are more restricted by the problems you mention.
I do believe that these interoperability problems can and will be solved. Five years ago, I couldn't tell a cpu from a computer case. I know a lot more now thanks to helpful hackers. It may take time, but it will be done.
I like the idea of lawyers getting a special icon but couldn't it be a fountain pen or a scale instead of a shark?
The lawyers that practice that way are far fewer and further in between than people think. I also believe that shark behavior does not make particularly effective lawyer behavior.
But if it was the shark or nothing I might have to reconsider since it would be really cool to get a special lawyer icon on slashdot.
The issues that arise with WordPerfect are a good example of the sort of problem that faces lawyers who need to work in heavily formatted documents.
As soon as you switch to Open Office, you need to start dealing with all of the WordPerfect attachments other lawyers send you. If its a document you need to edit and return the same day, using Open Office becomes questionable very fast.
Ditto when you go to print a label for an envelope on Open Office, and it won't line up correctly. At that point, you don't care whether the problem is caused by proprietary vendors that don't play well with others. You just need the problem fixed.
This is not a definition. All social problems end up included because the idea of a "spiritual" social problem is undefined. What does it mean to talk about a "spiritual" social problem as distinguished from a social problem that is observable? A definition needs to make distinctions rather than blur them.
And there's a bigger and older problem: what is an example of a social problem that is caused by pornography?
Pornography still needs its definition too. . . .
It doesn't add much to suggest that consumers show id so that minors are unable to purchase Playboy magazine. That's a circular definition of pornography.
I don't understand what the phrase "secular manifestations of harm" is intended to mean.
More to the point, the law generally refrains from consideration of moral questions. The law is about making society more fair. Morality is about how individuals choose to lead a good life.
The need to separate church from state arose historically because churches answer the question of how to live a good life differently from one another. When governments try to enforce a particular moral standard, the right --- and responsibility --- to an individual moral conscience is compromised.
Even the conservative majority opinion in Miller speaks in terms of community standards and whether the material at issue describes sex offensively while also lacking cultural value (e.g. aesthetic, political, scientific, etc.)
The call for "some level of regulation" is not a very promising standard for a new jurist-in-waiting to urge upon judges considering obscenity cases.
The issue is whether a standard can be made to determine --- specifically --- whether a particular image is or is not obscene.
I checked your previous post but did not find any specifics about which specific images you think the state has a compelling interest to regulate.
Interesting you should mention MLSA as my work with them originally inspired my own interest in open source. (I worked there for 2 years and have a connection that goes back further than that.)
They do have calendaring through the Kemp software (proprietary) which they purchase show compliance on their LSC grant. There's a lot of variation among offices as to what Kemp is used to do.
I'm not familiar with squirrel mail or the online time clock, but Firefox and Thunderbird are of course available to them when they're ready.
MLSA is poised to be a real leader on open source because they've received national recognition from LSC for their commitment to technological approaches to poverty law (video conferencing, lawhelp.org, etc.)
However, to my knowledge, MLSA and LSC (national) have spent their grant money on proprietary solutions for the most part.
The only organized effort behind using open source for poverty law that I know about is called the Open Source Initiative. It was organized at a national level and has done interesting stuff.
There's also a cool article in Clearinghouse Review about XML, but otherwise its slim pickins.
My perception is that open source is perfect for small offices --- professional offices generally --- rural or urban. I've experienced fewer compatibility issues with Open Office than with WordPerfect --- esp. after the Montana Supreme Court adopted MS Word as its standard word processing format.
I'd be really happy to find others trying to make Open Office work in a professional environment. You're probably right that its wrong of me to try and blame that on the size of the population here. It has more to do with my being a newbie.
Have you noticed much use of Open Office in professional offices in Helena?
This is great news. I use OpenOffice in my small town law practice, and I'm so happy to be liberarted from the tyranny of proprietary licensing fees. Lack of compatibility between software packages (office, accounting, case mgmt., etc.) is an even bigger problem for law offices in rural areas, like mine, who want to explore open source but lack support services.
I'm learning --- ever so slowly --- more about Linux and Samba so I can complete the office transformation some day. Its hard to find patient teachers, and tech understanding comes slowly to some of us. Its worth the effort though.
The article has an interesting comparison between transportation and wireless access as economic development issues. Are the two really that similar?
A highway does enable more commerce to and from an area. Are there studies that demonstrate that broadband access results in economic growth even in rural areas?