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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS

Posted by timothy on from the left-to-right dept.

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?"

3 of 611 comments (clear)

  1. MS is helping me deploy OO.org by Kris_J · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. I wonder how well they did? by tal_mud · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Hebrew Mozilla by tomer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...