Discuss: FOSS Legal Services for Low-Income
Communities  

Should nonprofit law firms invest grant funds in teaching their client communities to use free and open source software and then hire those same community members? Or should they continue to invest in proprietary licenses, upgrades and vendor support contracts? Could clients learn to use FOSS to build LAN's, websites, asterisk servers and custom databases; lower administrative overhead and reduce nonprofit dependency on proprietary licenses?

http://lsntap.org/opensourcelawoffice
http://www.openmissoula.org/monte_jewell
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Avatar Image late_rabbit  2 years ago late_rabbit: 69 points  

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late_rabbit late_rabbit: 69 points   2 years ago
Example: A mission objective of a mythical grant-funded nonprofit includes economic empowerment of low-income women.

Said nonprofit also buys proprietary code licenses with its grant money to account for their use of grant funds, to equip their employees' workstations and to run their telephone systems.

Why not teach their clients to use FOSS? And then the same clients could be hired to solve problems for the nonprofit using FOSS that were formerly solved with proprietary code.

Grant money would be redirected from proprietary vendors directly to the clients of the nonprofit --- thus fulfilling the mission of the nonprofit to economically empower women.
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