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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS
CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency.
MS scorns the defection...
This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"
In my opinion, Open Office still has many issues which need to be fixed in future releases to compete with MS Office. I don't know whether that was taken into consideration in this move, but certainly a step in the right direction for open source.
A blog like any other.
Some of the best thinkers and code writers come from Israel. Given this fact, it is no wonder they resent outside monopoly control over software, albeit from the friendly US of A.
OTOH, Israel should be latching on to stuff like AbiWord, Gnumeric etc. rather than OOo. The latter neither provides full feature compatibility with MS Office, nor has any specific advantages to be adopted as a standard.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I'm reminded of when a large australian company changed to an OSS desktop solution, and MS decried this as "a blow for choice in the market". No explanation of how this could be possible, but everything is sound bites, a mere snippet of text that cannot possibly convey any real meaning of a situation.
... agency has selected an immature and unproven software package" could well be applied to anyone looking towards Longhorn.
"The
Few will make that leap of judgment to understand the hypocrisy.
RST
Exactly the same feeling about this story. But Microsoft is not the US right ? Two different issues here, and I'm not going to debate the former one. Finkelstein already did the job.
However, this is a good step for free software, indeed. And I sincerely think that OO is able to cope with the requirements of the employment agency. I won't say what OO would be able to cope with in my opinion, I don't want flamewars over MS.
Jeez, is this auto-censorship ?
I need a cigarette...
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
when the little pebbles start to hit microsofts bank accounts then ill agree, untill then microsoft will do the same old thing. You have to understand, to most people windows is what a computer is, they have no intrest in changing.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Too bad world leaders ignore a 2-millenia old teaching in favor of killing, greed and jealousy.
Indeed, the "2-millenia old teaching" I assume you're referring to (i.e. the collection of oral traditions collectively known as "The Bible", which was actually a continuous work from the 2nd millenium BC to the 5th century AD) does favor killing, greed and jealousy. Oh, and sexism and racial hatred too !
I just can't get where Christians got their "loving God" stuff from, but it's certainly not from the Old Testament. The Bible is a long compendium of slaughters, most of them being comitted ad majorem Dei gloriam. Ever read the Books of Kings ?
The Arabs did not invent anything. Waging Djihad and stoning blasphemers and adulteres comes directly from good old Moses. The difference between the East and the West right now simply comes from the fact that the West managed to break the bounds of Religion. The East didn't.
Thomas Miconi
Yea, adopting a simple black and white mentality sure makes this an easy issue to deal with. The way you worded the above paragraph gives the impression that you think acts of agression seem to originate solely from the Palestinian side and the Israeli government (and extremists, yes there are Israeli terrorists as well you know) is left high and dry trying to defend its citizens. Blowing up a Starbucks is definetly not a counter attack but why don't you point your finger at Israel as well? Are you telling me that they haven't inticed violence at all or overreacted in any way by killing innocent Palestinians?
My point isn't that the Palestinians are being treated unfairly (eventhough I feel they are). It is that people like you need to adopt a more balanced view regarding this situation. Both sides are equally guilty for committing atrocious crimes and that the blame should be shared equally.
True, but with the BSA breathing down your neck, that's not such an attractive option. And besides, if you bothered to read the article, it says that one of the Israeli government's main concerns had to do with editing documents in Hebrew text, which is difficult to do with MS Office and is not something particularly high on Microsoft's priorities. They couldn't give a rat's ass about all of the other "features" that new versions of Word and Office had. The key feature they were interested in is not there. If they can't easily write documents written in their own national language, then what good is it? The version of OpenOffice they'll be using has this type of support.
As I recall, the same thing could have happened around 1996-7 with Iceland, had a viable alternative existed at the time. Microsoft was slow to add Icelandic to Windows and Office 95, despite repeated requests from the Icelandic government. The language eventually made it into Windows 98. Sadly, no viable alternatives to a Windows desktop existed at the time. (Before anyone shouts, I hope everyone remembers what Linux looked like at the time, and whether anyone would let barely computer-literate government workers use it in the state it was back in 1996.).
Internationalization and localization is really something that Free Software does very quickly and effectively, and something that Microsoft is particularly weak at by comparison. Perhaps the use of Linux and Free Software will begin to grow more rapidly in places where i18n and l10n matter a lot.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Microsoft's attitude speaks volumes here as well
Glad someone else saw that, too. Earth to Redmond: In addition to being obnoxious, the "tight fisted" comment can be read as an anti-Semitic slur.
So MS has painted themselves into a corner, and now they're kernel-panicking. They can't support Linux or BSD for business reasons, the Mac is a *nix box now too so it's out of the picture for them, and they've already pre-announced that their next Windows version can potentially, via DRM and copyrighted file formats, usurp the document owners' rights to their data. Why would one of world's most security-conscious states go for a deal that locks them into the world's least security-conscious software company?
"Buy it or we'll call you names" isn't going to cut it as a response. And for some reason, I don't think you need "advanced enterprise features" to crank out form letters that read: "Dear [applicant]: Thank you for your interest in..." even if it they do read from right to left.
Gotta give MS the Darl McBride Brass Balls Award though. It takes a lot of nerve for a company that can't even suffer the possibility of a hypothetical competitor cutting into its revenues in the future, to call someone else "tight-fisted" for not reaching into his pocket for cold cash right now, just to buy the privilege of paying again and again any time MS decides to "increase shareholder value."
And then there's the delicious irony of IBM and free software being the spoilers. [theatrical-trailer-voice] Twenty years ago, he stole their operating systems, (clip) and plunged the world into reboots (clip), incompatibilities (clip), and perpetual upgrades (pause). Now, they're back - with a vengeance! (30-sec. action clip sequence to dark screen. Cue titles) Desktop Wars II: IBM returns. Now playing in Israel and the West Bank. In theaters worldwide next Summer. This feature has not yet been understood by the Software Association of America.[/theatrical-trailer-voice]
If opening a document makes you a criminal, then I say the sooner the better, then the general populace might understand that having corporations like MS run your government isn't a good thing.
It's just as likely people will ditch MSOffice than OO. In fact more so - who will want to work with a package that can't save files you can open anywhere else (even on a non-fritz PC which will be the vast majority for many years to come - there are *zero* fritz chips in circulation at the moment). No company is going to use Word if they deal with Europe, asia, in fact anywhere else but the US, because their documents would be unreadable.
OTOH I can't see MS committing that kind of suicide. They're not *that* stupid.
Might it have something to do with the land that they were given was at the time brittish territory? Or the fact that their ancestors had lived in that area for as long as the palestinians? Originaly they had a very small section of land, given to them by the brittish government. Then 6 other nations decided they didn't like that and invaded. Israel beat them back and in the process captured territories (a convention of warfare, any land captured is yours) and now the paletinians are pissed because they have less land. Lesson to the palestinians, if you want to keep your land, don't go starting wars you can't win.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Actually Office 2K debugged most of the features of Office 97. By the same token, Office 2k3 should debug all of them and some of the new features introduced with Office 2K.
I agree with your mother. I updated much earlier but that was because O97 wasn't stable with larger documents or embedded objects. However, I now stick with O2K on my remaining Windows system.
See my journal, I write things there
The Jewish people were sent into exile 2000 years ago, and yet they survived the Inquisition, pogroms, WWII, Stalin, etc. and always aspired to return to their land.
It's really dangerous to assume its reasonable to pick the time when your chosen nation was at its largest extent and assume you get to put the clock back.
One could just as reasonably say that they were once part of the Babylon empire, and therefore should be part of modern Iraq. Or under the Romans, so should be part of Italy.
These mythic religious fantasies are really damaging - witness the crusades.
There aren't any good, simple solutions to these problem. Several people have reasonable claims to the territory, and they need to work towards a reasonable solution.
Oh well, I am bored. So here goes:
The parent poster was referring to the fact that ownership of anything is a pretty interesting idea. Land even more so -- stable ownership of land is a gift of society, so there is no real guarantee of ownership when you leave (or get thrown off) some land you saw as 'yours' if there is no larger society there to acknowledge your ownership.
So the Muslims were expanding into other territories. These terretories did not start of populated, nor did they remain in the same hands for very long in historical terms. So who does the land 'belong' to?
Should the United states be abandoned and left to the remaining native Americans? Should Africa be swept clean of Europeans and left to native Africans? If so, which native Africans. The first tribe to occupy the land, or the second who took it by force or the third who paid them for it?
Not quite so easy.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient