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San Francisco
I am a lawyer and community-builder, and currently the co-founder and general counsel of Tidelift.
In previous lives, I've been:
- Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation;
- a board member of the Open Source Initiative, and chair of the licensing committee;
- an associate at Greenberg Traurig, working for a variety of clients on technology transactions and licensing issues;
- an attorney at Mozilla, where I led the revision of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0;
- maintainer of a GPL'd operating system for Lego Mindstorms robots;
- QA and management with GNOME, Ximian, and Novell;
- a member of the GNOME board of directors.
Authored Comments
Tridge: let me start with a meta-statement about tools, which is that I didn't use Word from 1997 to 2008, and didn't use a proprietary desktop from 1997-2010, so I'm well aware of the alternatives; I'm not coming straight out of the proprietary world.
The problem with your EU lawyers is not that they were using Windows, it is that they didn't know what was available to them on Windows. OCR-based pdf->doc conversion tools are pretty commonly available; most lawyers have them available somewhere in their firm. They are neither free nor libre, but they are there. And since they are outputting .doc, the output can be used with a sophisticated array of tools for diffs, history, commenting, etc.- much like the tools we have for text, but easier to use for mere mortals and aware of document structure as a bonus.
I'd guess the answer is 'frankly, not many'; I definitely know some people use Open Office (and it is considered poor form by many to send .doc to other people 'in the community') but most of us must have Microsoft Office installed in order to talk to other lawyers.
And as I've repeatedly discussed in my own blog, OpenOffice is, frankly, very bad software, with very little vision for how to improve itself into being good software. So it isn't surprising that lawyers aren't using it much- our word processor is our primary tool, and we must be satisfied with it in order to be productive.
I'd kill, frankly, for a simple, basic, user-focused Free word processor which used html+css as the document format and robust version control for collaboration. But I'm not seeing anyone working on that. :/