Hello: This is a reply to the above identified message on this list, which began like: " Do I have a problem with kmail? Is this project dead again? Died over a discussion about which programming language should be used?.............." I would very much like to see this project -of whose existence I just took notice- gain new life, although I got somewhat lost over the discussion on whether to use a single programming language or not. (Btw, I personally believe that confining development to a single programming language, no matter how good it might seem, contradicts the very nature of free software & highly limits available development possibilities, as some people pointed out). Anyway, from this distant point where I am sitting (both geographically & regarding knowledge about the project) this discussion does not seem so relevant as the one which should (in my view) take care of the project's goals and the needs of its (potential) users. Although hesitatingly, since I'm too new in this list, I believe I could somewhat contribute to the discussion in telling about my experiences in this field; so, in the following lines I will put my point of view forth, which might or might not be of interest to the list readers; I hope it is not quite out of the point, and apologize beforehand if it gets rather long. As a starting point for these considerations, I would like to say that I'm an argentine lawyer with a great fondness about linux & opensource & free software; I have met in recent days (online) with some other lawyers from other cities, all of them interested in the possibility of migrating to linux, but hindered by the fact that there is no (known) software to replace the legal-case management software adopted by the vast majority of legal buros (consisting mostly of one kind of proprietary software). I myself have been trying to develop some kind of replacement, using postgresql as the basis; what I have is a very functional database reflecting the state of the different cases I handle, which quite meets my needs, although much is to be done in order to render it userful for people lacking knowledge of the sql language or not wanting to spend their time with it. Needless to say, much has also to be done with it in a number of other respects, like document-management integration and many other desirable features; nonetheless, the point here is that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to get a replacement to the proprietary legal-case management products, which btw run mostly, if not only, on the various versions of windows. I have tried some time ago a couple of the products featured in the debian-lex wiki, namely 'ètude' and 'kumula', both of which seem to focus on different tasks of a legal office. Pity is, that they don't seem to be actively developed: ètude's last release dates from January 2004!; and although kumula's developer told me about 5 months ago that version 2 of kumula-cases was on the verge, none of this seems to have happened. I haven't been able to fiddle too much with the present release of kumula-cases since it uses mysql as the underlying database, and I haven't had the time to look around a way to import the data from my postgres-based cases in order to test it. Its concept seemed quite interesting, though. This shows that each piece of software (or at least, much of it) is a project in itself, needing its own attention; it doesn't seem to me that it is possible to get a legal-office oriented distribution working without (re)working the different pieces of software that are needed in the (once more, very different) legal environments. Moreover, I think that a distro should take into account the complexities of different legal systems & hence different requirements for similar tasks, and even the need for different approaches. An integration development of these might be a major task, but would, in turn -IMHO-, greatly advance its adoption. Although this might seem a daunting task, I don't think it is impossible, if enough people gather around the project; since I see more and more people from the legal profession interested in free software, the question is whether there are also programmers interested in this niche. But in any case, it seems imperative (again, IMHO) to get an accord on what are the distro's goals, like e.g., if it will run both on servers & desktops, or only servers, or only desktops; or have a clear idea of what tasks the different pieces of specialized software should perform, if we shall have accounting, what kind of accounting; if we shoud have image-processing capabilites (including OCR), how they will integrate in case management; what the distro's users would be like (i.e., will they be sysadmins or end users pertaining to the legal profession?), & so on. Well, I hope not to have been impolite through this lengthy message, it comes out of the deep desire to have at last a tool suited for my professional work; and I hope to hear from you people getting again to discuss how debian-lex should look. Best greetings to all of you, Barbara -- Bárbara M. Figueirido Lawyer Bariloche- Argentina barbara at bariloche-com-ar
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