Israeli Government Suspends Microsoft Contracts

MartinB writes "According to The Register, in a double blow to Redmond, the Israeli government has both suspended all government contracts with Microsoft until at least the end of 2004, and Israeli Antitrust Authority director general Dror Strum has ruled that Microsoft is subject to US court limitations. At issue in part is Microsoft's refusal to support Hebrew in Mac versions of Office."

Comments

Tunnels

[SoSueMe]

Hope there are no tunnels at the Microsoft compound that could be used for smuggling.

More than just convenience

[the man with the pla]

I am an Isreali citizen living in the United States. It's true that I as a professional do almost all of my work in English. But I am writing to say that being able to use my native hebrew means an awful lot to me and my family. It's not a matter of convenience, it touches on our religous and cultural beliefs. I am very glad to see the government take this action.

Re:More than just convenience

[twistedcubic]

No disrespect, but you can get OpenOffice for free, which supports Hebrew, as people are saying. So if Microsoft gets cut off, your options are still the same-- use OpenOffice or another word processor that supports Hebrew. You should make the transition today, and tell everyone you know! :)

Re:More than just convenience

[BlueGecko]

On the one hand, I'm glad that packages such as OpenOffice are available, but you have got to realize that, if you really need to exchange a large number of Office documents, there is no real alternative except Office. I wish that weren't true, I try to minimize how much Office I use by using alternative products, and I wish OpenOffice the best of luck in the world and look forward to when I can use it in place of Office. However, for the moment, there are times--many of them--when I absolutely have no choice except to use Office, and the simple matter is that Microsoft has steadfastly refused not only to support Hebrew, but also Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese--really, any non-Latin language--in the Macintosh version of Word. That is wholly and entirely unacceptable, and I think that the Israeli government probably has a perfect valid point. Their reaction is perhaps a tad bit overkill, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.

Disclaimer: I am a US citizen whose native languages are American English and Southern and I am happy that way. :)

Re:More than just convenience

[repetty]

"No disrespect, but you can get OpenOffice for free, which supports Hebrew, as people are saying. So if Microsoft gets cut off, your options are still the same-- use OpenOffice or another word processor that supports Hebrew. You should make the transition today, and tell everyone you know! :)"

Bad recommendation. As of today, you are asking this guy and all his Mac-using friends to DL and install Apple's X11 package and then DL and install OpenOffice.org's suite (which is a significant upgrade behind the x86 versions).

Have you done this yourself? Do you understand what you are recommending that this guy, his family, and friends do?

Do you think his daughter or father even know what X11 is?

--Richard

Re:More than just convenience

[Mark Gordon]

1) Israel is intended as a Jewish state, not an Ashkenazic state. Knowledge of Yiddish was never as universal among Jews as was Hebrew. Sephardim and Mizrachim typically don't know Yiddish beyond cognate Hebrew and Aramaic loan words. Hence, Israel standardized on Hebrew. Granted, most of the early Zionists were in the habit of ignoring rabbinical opinion.

2) Not all text editing is mundane. Prayer books and the like are typically printed, and someone has to write such things. Furthermore, Hebrew never completely died out as a language of biblical scholarship.

3) Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino: the major non-Hebrew vernacular languages used by Jews throughout history have traditionally been written from right to left and would necessitate the same bidirectional support that makes Hebrew so hard to support. It's only within the last hundred years or so that most Jews learned to read from left to right before learning to read from right to left.

4) Any rejection of Hebrew as a mundane language is post-biblical, and there doesn't seem to have been an especially strong rabbinical consensus on the matter, even if some rabbis held that opinion. Even independent of biblical scholarship, there was plenty of secular Hebrew literature in the middle ages, long after Hebrew ceased to be a vernacular, and long before modern Zionism revived vernacular Hebrew.

5) Yiddish was initially popular (at least among Askhenazim) because it was comprehensible (at least the spoken version) to the local gentile population. The vocabulary is mostly from Middle High German. Ladino is similarly derived from Spanish. Aramaic isn't an exclusively Jewish language at all, being originally a gentile vernacular (Syriac, an Aramaic dialect, still survives as a gentile vernacular in some villages), though it is used in some prayers, a few later parts of the Bible, and the Talmud, and it's still used in some rabbinical contexts. So non-Hebrew languages aren't necessarily embraced because they offer less sacred alternatives to Hebrew, nor are religious writings (even liturgy!) exclusively in Hebrew.

OpenOffice supports Hebrew

[jkauzlar]

I just checked and it seems to be true, though there may be some issues with it.

Re:No Apple Support

[FooAtWFU]

No, as the article says, there are people out there would would cover the costs of adding support for Microsoft. They're just being anticompetitive and attempting to herd people into buying Win Doze.

Re:I like Jews

[SoSueMe]

...and we like j00Z too. oh, I get it... Nevermind.

Re:No Apple Support

[Delphiki]

Apple does support Hebrew. Microsoft does not support Hebrew in their Mac software.

Deuteronimicus 13:37

[Chagatai]

"And yea, the Lord spake unto the Israelites saying unto them, 'Lo, go forth and build unto me a nation worthy of praise and power. Build thy nation upon the backbones of small bird that are black and white, that stay where the cold winds blow. And when thine enemy arrives in the night, thou shalt see him wearing portholes like unto windows, bearing wares which thou shalt not take, for I have set the aside to be a land free of gates and minions who roam everywhere in thy houses.' And the Israelites did so, smiting the foes who doth galavant in the street like large apes with too much wine, shouting that their ways are superior. And so it was good, for they did not bow down before the false idols of the Mik-roh-softi."

Amen.

Re:No Apple Support

[Shipud]

Actually, Apple does support Hebrew, system level, and there are several good non-MS bi and tri- (Hebrew, Arabic & English) font products on the Mac. Trouble is, non of them are MS-Word compatible. Or rather, they try to be, but MS-Redmond & Tel-Aviv keep changing the rules. The Hebrew/English MS-Word is horrible (I spent quite a bit of time on it). Imagine the compounding bugs that crop up due to the requirement of cursor direction reversal, and added fonts and you get the idea. The Mac & the 3rd party products are a bit cumbersome, but by far less buggy

The real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

They were pretty happy that MS products didn't work on the sabbath. What really got them mad was that they didn't work any other day either.

Re:Foolish on both sides

[Davak]

I agree that Microsoft is bad etc, etc... however...

It's sad when a country uses its laws to try to force a company to do certain things.

If you don't give us Hebrew, we'll declare you a monopoly! Well, that's bullshit. Laws are laws... either Microsoft is a monopoly by their laws or not. It should have nothing to do with microsoft's decision not to have certain software packages in Hebrew.

This really makes you wonder how Isreal looks at things...

Davak

Re:Software internationalization - is Hebrew hard?

[jrumney]

Hebrew and Arabic are written right to left, except for numbers and snippets of other languages, which are written left to right within the right to left text. This requires Bi-Driectional (BIDI) text support, and is very hard to support correctly and efficiently for read-write programs where the user can just put their cursor anywhere and start typing. Most software either does BIDI correctly or does something resembling it efficiently, seldom both.

Re:or...

[Blondie-Wan]

m$ hates god

Of course. MS sees God as competition. ;)

Re:Yeah, Hebrew in Mac Office makes sense.

[AstroDrabb]

That is not the point. The point is that the version of MS Office for MS Windows DOES support right to left. MS Does not want the Mac version to have this feature to force users to use MS Windows over Mac if they want right to left Hebrew in MS Office. So again, it is a monopoly doing what they do best.

No compile Loc?

[soft_guy]

Under MacOS X, you can *sometimes* do a no-compile Localization, even if you are not the original developer.

I *know* that Office for Mac isn't exactly a well-behaved "normal" Mac app - heck, it isn't even a normal *Carbon* app. I did work at Microsoft as a Mac developer, so I am somewhat familar with the architecture of Office.

My suggestion is that they could look at the possibility of doing a no compile loc themselves, if they have Arabic support (very ironic!).

Both Arabic and Hebrew are hard to support because both require bidirectional (BiDi) text support. Meaning that text is layed out both left to right and right to left.

If your supporting international, French, Spanish are the easiest because you're still dealing with Roman character sets and one direction of layout. You just have to make sure you read the strings in from a resource someplace. Next hardest is Cyrilic languages like Greek or Russian. Next hardest is languages like Japanese where you need to have double byte characters or Unicode. The hardest is Arabic and Hebrew because of BiDi. People may often choose to do an Arabic version and not Hebrew because the market for Arabic is larger.

However, if you've put in BiDi support already and you're already internationalized, getting Hebrew to work shouldn't be insanely hard and could possibly be done by a third party, though there would probably be some bugs they couldn't fix (although they could report these back the MacBU and maybe work something out.)

Or they could use heavy handed "the customer is always right" tactics. Either way...

Re:Software internationalization - is Hebrew hard?

[laird]

You can either use the operating system's built in text layout widget, which supports all of this correctly with no work, but doesn't give you any control over what's going on, or you can code your own layout engine, giving you complete control, but you'd have to add support for everything yourself. Given the control you'd need for a real word processor, I am sure that MS coded their own layout engine, so it'd be an immense amount of work to add support for bi-directional languages, etc. If MS supports any right-to-left languages already (Arabic, etc.) it shouldn't be any work at all to add support for Hebrew.

Partly

[Llywelyn]

Well, you're mostly right.

Implementing internationalization for hebrew is trivial in Cocoa-based apps. It is significantly more difficult for Carbon based apps (which MS Office likely is). Microsoft also has a *serious* NIH syndrome when it comes to anything Apple-based and seems to prefer to implement their own versions of everything rather than use Apple's built-in libraries, so even if they could use Apple's internationalization (which I should add is absolutely gorgeous for Hebrew), I have a sneaking suspicion they would want to implement and use their own.

Re:Foolish on both sides

[Frostalicious]

Well, that's bullshit. Laws are laws... either Microsoft is a monopoly by their laws or not.

Well according to the article, a monopoly in Israel is...."any company with 50 per cent market share. Tying is illegal, as is unreasonably refusing a service. violations are considered criminal felonies".

Do I need to convince you that Microsoft has 50% market share on the desktop? I hope not. So they are a monopoly, and thus have additional obligations under Israeli law, like not "unreasonably refusing a service". Therefore the country CAN "use its laws to try to force a company to do certain things". It can force them to provide the service.

I'm not sure on the details of this, but by the article, it seems that Bill Gates is now a criminal in Israel.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[soft_guy]

The parent post is misleading. Apple does have Hebrew support in MacOS X and has been supporting Hebrew for many years. (And Arabic, too.)

Heck, they even demoed a Klingon version os MacOS X to really drive home how well they nailed international support in MacOS X.

The issue is Microsoft Office for Mac which is not an Apple product.

Don't get too excited

[hendrix69]

The Israeli government is just holding out in order to get a better deal on MS products for the upcoming years. Too much of the government and the army's software is tied too MS for a transition to Linux to take place. Besides, no other platform, sadly, has as good a support of Hebrew as MS. Although it's getting better constantly - the latest OpenOffice, for example, is quite an improvement.
There's also the issue of MS's political power through the US government. Israel gets quite a bit of money from the US and large portions of it are conditioned on the buying of American products with this money. So I wouldn't bet on Israel doing the Munich thing. At least not for a while.

Re:Have you ever managed a software project?

[Shipud]

...the CEO of Apple's Israeli representative Yeda offered to underwrite the localization work, pay 1million shekels, and assure a pre-order of 2,000 copies from Apple France - but Microsoft Israel declined.

So Yeda offered to take the job upon themsleves. MS does not have to pay anything to add Hebrew. Why does MS still refuse? Could it be they like their Windows platform better than Mac-OS?

Open Office Has Had Support For A While

[Solokron]

Open Office has had Hebrew support for quite some time.

2002 Hebrew OpenOffice Files

Open Office Hebrew HowTo

Here's my chance to ask!

[Erwos]

How the hell do you type nekudot (vowels) in OpenOffice 1.1? For the life of me, I've been unable to figure it out!

Otherwise, awesome work. Assuming you install the Hebrew fonts, Hebrew support is "out of the box" in RH9, and it even has the Culmus fonts!

-Erwos

Re:I guess when you have suicide bombers . . .

[cranos]

This is not defensive, it is offensive. The fact that the settlements still exists and in fact are growing, makes it an offensive campaign. If the Israelis were truly sincere about defence, they would have pulled back to their legitimate borders instead of routinely flouting the UN resolutions and building WMDS(mmmm seems a familiar scenario).

You missed the really big story here

[fidros]

This statement came out only after the Israeli government effort to help organise and partly finanace a Sun, IBM & Israeli Open Source activists project to drive Hebrew and Arabic support to Open Office became a success with the results showing in version 1.1 - the first stable penOffice version that supports Bidi languages (Hebrew & Aarabic) in a close to decent way.

Forget what they say about the reasons for this move and look at the facts - this is a premeditated move and a damn smart one.

I just wish other givernment would be as smart.

Wrong direction, dudes

[shachart]

I'm an Israeli, and as such am more intimate with the details of the annoucement. What the Israeli government drives at here is neither a stab at Microsoft for lower prices, Hebrew for Macs, or anything of that sorts.

What it drives for is open standards. Unfortunately, our economy is not too strong right now, and a when a poor fellow buys a computer, she cannot afford to pay another $129 on Windows, $200 on Word, or $300 on Office, which accumulates to (almost) more money than the hardware itself. She can install Linux, and will be able to use OpenOffice, of course. But what about opening Hebrew word files? No luck there.

As part of a cross-government effort for open standards (see some government sites for documents), they also drive for open standards. If pushing MS to do so by not buying their software anymore will accomplish that, then I salute 'em... :)

As for Linux penetration here in Israel, I can say it is no lesser than the situation in the US or Europe. No Munich yet, but we're getting there...