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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?"

1 of 611 comments (clear)

  1. apt-get rollout of OO.org likely by Debian+Troll's+Best · · Score: 1, Troll
    This story really reminds me of some work that I'd done a few years ago with a Hebrew Studies department at a fairly major U.S. university. Basically the department needed to maintain a mid-sized lab (around 80 machines) of systems running in a full Hebrew OS and application environment. The local system administrators didn't want anything to do with it (they weren't used to dealing with any regionalization issues at all), so that's when I got called in. The nightmare was basically how to manage software rollouts (and the occasional rollback!), but all within the context of a 100% Hebrew language environment. The answer was obvious: apt-get!

    The first thing I had to do was code up a linker/wrapper between the apt-get and dselect text interface libraries to the Hebrew libraries present on Debian. This took a few weeks, but with by judicious use of the LISP hooks I'd placed in my own private source tree for apt-get a year or two previously, it was no real problem. The next thing to do was to convert the apt-get and dselect command syntax to reading right to left as is done in Hebrew, rather than the normal Western left to right. One of the jokers in my software team suggested setting up a mirror in front of the screen...and then adding it to the apt.sources file (gettit...a mirror!!), but we were able to get the department to extend our contract by a month (they were pretty tight for cash), and within the 30 days we'd re-written all the low-level display routines in dselect so that they outputted text in the correct orientation.

    Needless to say, the system is still operational even now, and they don't have any problems at all managing their software rollouts on Debian. It wouls not surprise me at all if the Israeli Governemt tried to adopt another similar, final solution. As they say, apt-get shalom!