Open Source Prime Time? Sometimes...

No doubt the open source movement is having a significant, tangible, positive impact on the technology industry. It's success grows every day as we see it moving up the priority list of IT Managers and CIOs in large part because of the cost savings it offers. Even though open source has arrived on a macro scale, I see plenty of difficulties on a micro scale, which reminds me open source needs to make significant strides to be truly mainstream.

The micro level difficulties range from quirky annoyances to significant impediments to performing necessary activities. For example, I spoke at a PLI legal continuing education course on open source licensing a few months ago, and I will speak on a panel at the Open Source Business Conference next week. Both presentations required submission of slides and associated documentation prior to the presentation. A message went out to presenters: "Our presentation machines *do not* support OpenOffice." Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Office were the only supported formats (in fact, sometimes even PDF is not supported). In addition, when collaborating with colleagues, no matter how carefully one converts OpenOffice documents to Microsoft Office formats, formatting and content problems are almost certain to occur.

[Update: OSBC presenters received an e-mail update today notifying us that OpenOffice documents are in fact supported for the presentation. Great news! One small step towards making open source practical for everyone in all circumstances.]

On an even more granular level, while open source tools are generally pretty good, they are not quite ready for full product use. Redlining, for example, is a critical tool lawyers and others use for tracking changes between different versions of contracts. While I use OpenOffice a majority of the time and am largely satisfied with it, the document comparison feature is inaccurate and unreliable. (For a positive spin on use of OpenOffice and other open source software in legal workflows, check out the Open Source for Lawyers website.)

My point is not to steer you away from open source. On the contrary, I am a heavy user of open source applications for my work and personal projects including Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning for e-mail and calendar, and GIMP as a Photoshop alternative. However, I am acutely aware of the limitations of these applications when it's crunch time. When I have 15 minutes to produce a redline that will properly display all the sneaky changes an opposing attorney has made to a contract, I simply can't rely on OpenOffice. I hope this changes sometime in the near future.