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?"

Comments

MS is helping me deploy OO.org

[Kris_J]

Because Office XP was so awful, we've stuck with Office 2000. We've just started receiving .doc files that Office 2000 can't open, but the latest release of Open Office can. Now, if anyone receives one of these latest Office files from outside, I just install OO. Everyone gets to keep their preferred version of MS Office while being exposed to Open Office in small doses.

I wonder how well they did?

[tal_mud]

Doing Bi-directional text well has lots of pitfalls. E.g. the software has to recognize when you start typing in a number and switch directions (The number five hundred thirty one still appears as 531 in hebrew, not 135).

Mixing left-to-right with right-to-left is even worse. E.g. when you are on the boundary between the two texts and hit the backspace key, which piece of text gets erased?

Lots of other subtle problems to getting it perfect. I hope they did a good job.

Re:I wonder how well they did?

[Sun]

This scenario has to do with misunderstanding the Arabs. This time, it's the europeans.

As you may know, the digits we use are called "Arab digits", because the Arabs invented the decimal system. Around the middle ages the european found out these numbers. However, they did not stop to fully gasp how to use them.

In Arabic, 123 would be read as "three and twenty and one hundred". This means that it is written from right to left, just like the rest of the language. Europeans, eager to read things from left to right, interpret that as "one hundred and twenty three", leaving the digits in the same order, but reversing the reading order.

Unlike what many would like to think, Hebrew is not an ancient language. Biblical Hebrew is, of course. However, while biblical Hebrew does use the decimal system more or less, it counts like the arabs (starting from the units, and advancing upwards). The writing notation resembles the roman one, and was not decimal.

The modern Hebrew was mostly drafted by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who's native language was ..... Polish. As such, a lot of European influence made it into the modern Hebrew. One such influence are the numbers, that are now written left to right.

Oh yes, the typewriters simply let you write numbers units first. This was a small problem. Proper billingual text, however, is today very popular. This text requires a better engine for layout.

Re:IMO

[zulux]

Refuse to collaborate with them until they 'get it'."

What dreamland are you living in?

The real world.

All of our suppliers *must* use OO. No excuses. If they want our business, then they play by our rules.

Now we do have a few MS Office copies around for our customers - we play 'nice' with them.

OO vs MS Office 2003

[BrookHarty]

OpenOfice works great with all my files, in fact if it had exchange/templates it would be on par with MS Office 2003. Exchange in 2003 is faster, and has much more features. Syncing email is smooth as silk now over dialup/dsl. Visio has a great selection of icons, thats almost worth the price for the whole suite.

The other day, I recieved a PowerPoint that MSOffice couldnt open, OpenOffice opened it, exported back to .ppt and MS Office had no problem opening that. Very impressive.

But thats for work, at home I save money and use OpenOffice/Mozilla.

I hate being the bearer of bad news...

[MikShapi]

I'm as much an Open Source lover as the next FreeBSD religious geek, but the way I see the train going right now, here's where it'll get:

DMCA is already in action. TCPA and DRM are coming on us in the next couple of years, we already know Microsoft's Paladium will be present in longhorn. Fritz chips are already being sold, and sooner than we might like, DRM-enforcement will migrate from our motherboard into our CPU. Microsoft, Disney, the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been lobbying Intel and AMD over this for a while now.

This actually gets on-topic when the DMCA is used to trash competition, as in cases of 3rd-party-made garage-door remotes, printer cartridges and .. yes. Office suites that attempt to open MS Office formats.

Once Microsoft uses the DRM-enforcing Fritz chip (which, according to the DMCA legislation, must be present in your computer) to encode their .doc/.xls/.ppt/whatever files, it becomes _illegal_ [in the US] for OpenOffice to attempt to open them under the DMCA. Unless this can somehow be steered away, OO is going to be beheaded swiftly and cruelly, and nobody will use anything besides MS Office, because nothing else will open MS Office formats.

Many questions are asked about how this will affect non-US countries without silly DMCA legislation, and the legal answer is "It won't". The economic one however says "If there is no US market for products like OO, quite a few them may simply cease to exist". Add to that the unwillingness of many OS developers to contribute their time to an open source project that is used in other countries but makes them criminals in the US where they live, and where they cannot use their own project where they work.
OO may simply not bother breaking the DRM on Office files for non-US clients. And that would indeed hurt Israeli clients.

This conclusion makes me question the wisdom of moving an entire government agency to OO. It actually hurt me to say that.

Cheers.

Re:I hate being the bearer of bad news...

[MikShapi]

Here's a free tip. Never attack anyone personally. If you have a valid point, state it. Name calling is something that people revert to when they feel the point they're trying to make can't stand its ground on its own, and needs an intimidating muscle-showoff to help others get convinced. It screams at the reader that you yourself aren't buying into whatever it is you're saying. Here on /. it won't cut you any slack.

Now all you had to do was ask. Microsoft announced and revealed Palladium, and quite plainly As MS Employee states [Palladium] "is to be included in a future version of Windows, possibly in Windows XP successor Longhorn, scheduled for release in 2005".
Taking an educated guess based on the fact that their interest does lie there, that they announced it, that they're well underway developing it and that the DMCA was legislated, I'd dare say it will show up in Windows sooner or later. Sooner if they have anything to do with it.

If you do not yet realize the extent of the problem this poses, I strongly suggest you spend 10 minutes reading up .

Cheers mate.

Re:I hate being the bearer of bad news...

[johnos]

Good points, but the game is changing fast. Five years ago, markets outside North America (except for Europe) were considered irrelevant in the industry. Not anymore. Check out this interesting story . Or let me summarize the important points:

• The Thai Government's cheap Linux computer program is a smashing success.
• A local (Linux only) PC vendor has just passed HP to become the largest vendor in the country.
• Gartner says that only 40% of new computers sold in Thailand this year had Windows installed.

All this bad news after MS dropped the price of Windows+Office to US$37. If that's still too much, you can buy a Windows CD on many streetcorners for US$4. Clearly, many people are choosing Linux. Why do they want Linux instead of Windows? Because of a brilliant localization effort by the country's Linux community. The Linux Thai language support is far better, apparently, than Microsoft's. This leads to the interesting proposition that localization can be done better and cheaper by local volonteers. Product managers sitting in Redmond don't have the incentive or resources to compete with hundreds of grassroots efforts.

Thailand is not an exception, its just a few years ahead of other countries. Remember in Jurassic Park when the glass of water started shaking ominously? Thailand and Israel are the first two ripples.

Hebrew Mozilla

[tomer]

The next thing the Israeli govement thinking about is to adopt Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer for use with internal web applications and messaging. In the Hebrew press we got few messages about it in the past week, but I can't approve yet how much seriously they are.

The problem is that the Hebrew localization project for Mozilla still missing few features, because of [mostly] UI bugs in the browser.

Most of the major bugs in Mozilla for Hebrew users can be found in this list (Tsahi is the person who did most of the l10n progress). Any help would be welcome!

Hopefully, one day, we will get our whole goverment to use Linux on each desktop...

Re:Palladium is dying

[Tune]

>You have to understand something, the voices of SONY and the RIAA are the only voices that the government is listening to.

I believe the confusion is in the word "governments", which you use to refer to the Bush administration, but which I intended to use to refer to government agencies like Israel's Commerce department, the German government, China, Peru, etc. that are scared away by American lobbyist backed monopolies like Microsoft. I'm not sure about Sony, but the RIAA definitely does not have a very creditable reputation in lobbying these governments.

Just my $.02

--
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable -- John F. Kennedy

Re:A small step forward...

[sigxcpu]

The real issue is compatability with Hebrew.
SUN IBM and the Israeli Gov' spent real mony getting it into OO.
There is no alternative because no other office supports Hebrew.

Re:Atheism

[etrnl]

Atheism is a misnomer; it really should be called 'anti-theism'. Linguistical the 'a' does not denote a negative. Consider 'moral', 'immoral', and 'amoral'. 'Amoral' is not acting against morality, but with lack of concern towards morality. 'Immoral' is acting against morality.

'Anti-theism' ('imtheism' doesn't sound right...) would be stating that god does not exist. 'Atheism' should be the lack of concern as to whether or not a god exists. Note that this is different from 'agnosticism' which simply states that knowing whether or not god exists is impossible (at least at this time).

One of my personal pet peeves.

--etrnl--

OO.o good, MSO = bad

[1eyedhive]

I've been using OO.o for a few months now and have yet to find any big issues with it when compared to O2k.
Tables are easy to use, page numbering may take a bit to find, but until O2k it was a bitch to find there, too.
I like the integrated PDF export, something that if you want to do in MSO, you gotta get acrobat for a few hundred $'s... haven't had a problem yet.
I just sold my friend on OO.o a few months back and he's used it more than I, just made up somthing in calc and exported it to Excel 2k/XP without a hitch (his machine is Windows 2000).
I've also lightly used Linux as a desktop OS (i don't largly due to lack of good 3D support for my geforce4), and find the cross platform compatibility an outright godsend. I used MSO 98 for that mac and found i had to save as an office 97 doc and then open it, converting up automagically to o2k, breaking the reverse compatibility until i resaved as o97. with OO.o, the headache isn't there (though OO.o doesn't do mac classic and an OSX port is still on the way, i rarely use macs anyhow.)
MSO stinks, OO.o is better, any flaws in compatibility is due to the stupidity of the closed source format used by M$. at least with the oo.o files you can open them with your favorite zip utility and see what makes them tick. (Oo.o files are just zip archives containing xml files with the actual formatting and content therein, unlike .docs which are some bastardized... thing.)

Re:IMO

[zulux]

Actually, we expected a lot of push-back from our suppliers, but they have migrated rather easily. A few of the smaller ones have ditched MS Office for their own work - they love the price and it "heads down keep working" productutivity.

We just got tired of all the difering versions of MS Office documents and coulden't stomach another round of MS "Upgrades" - we took some of our money we saved and had a vendor appreciation party. Lots of free booze and a great meal makes everybody happy.

The only thing we can't find a replacement for is Outlook - the scheduling bits of it are quite good. (The Email portion sucks, and we don't allow anbody to use Outlook for their email for securty reasons)