We at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) seek to live up to our name and run our small law office with only Free Software. In this talk, SFLC’s CTO will discuss the challenges and successes using Ubuntu exclusively as both the server and desktop environment for a non-profit law firm.
Of course, the traditional system administration challenges such as problematic network printer setup, broken MUAs, and the like are unfortunately as common today on Ubuntu systems as they were ten years ago on Solaris. Despite these problems, we’ve found that joining the Free Software ethos with traditional law firm operations has made our operation more productive than we had hoped.
Our Ubuntu-based office is probably the first law firm to answer its doorbell and keep its billing records from IRC, to integrate intranet blogging solutions with incoming and outgoing telephone logs, and to use SVN to store its contract documents. This talk will detail these varied ways that SFLC has merged Free Software culture and tools to the non-profit legal world.