FSF Use Microsoft Word and Docx to Submit Its Amicus Brief | Hacker News Reader

FSF Use Microsoft Word and Docx to Submit Its Amicus Brief

techrights.org

7 pointszoobab11 comments

What a garbage "article."

From the garbage pile: "Could the FSF not find any law firm that, in addition to talking about or for Free software, does not use .NET, OOXML, and almost everything Microsoft? Even in 2025?"

One, no you cannot. Lawyers live in the world of Microsoft Office. Two, one does not choose a law firm based off the tools they use.

Par for the course with Techrights, unfortunately.

FSF has never been opposed to using privative software when there's no alternative.

Presumably, compatibility concerns forced them to.

Exactly - the court system does not accept PDFs generated by most open source tools. Pretty crazy.

Adobe and Microsoft must love that.

Many archiac court systems still demand filings in MS-Word.

The export features in Libreword is pretty good.

https://help.libreoffice.org/25.2/en-US/search?P=Docx&DEFAUL...

If you are familiar with pacer or ACMS - it is an old antiquated system. You can’t submit PDFs for example generated from anything other than Adobe Acrobat or exported from Microsoft word.

The federal system, and every state ecf system I’ve seen, requires PDF.

I’ve tried Star / Open / Libre Office every year since 9x. They still aren’t as robust as Word 6 for Windows 3.1 released 35 years ago.

Literally nobody cares

Lawyers will use whatever tool they know best for their job. And protip, LibreOffice is rarely that

Supporters of the FSF maybe?

Yeah, unless this is someone at the FSF, you don't really get to tell your attorney what tools they use. Sure, FSF could try and find someone who aligns with their beliefs, but often that's not feasible.

They must have used MS Office because Libreoffice doesn't save in DOCX.

Oh wait https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/

A DOCX file alone isn't enough evidence that MS Office was used.

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