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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.
I'm a staunch anti-occupation, anti-IDF individual because of Israel's brutal regime in the West Bank. But then I'm also an OOo supporter.
I'm torn.
Us Americans don't send them billions of dollars in aid every year just so they can go squander it on anti-American, pro-terrorist software. How can they claim to be our "allies" in the war against terror when they start using software based on principles of theft that Osama himself would agree to? This must stop. If Israel decides to go down the path of "Old Europe" and Red China we need to make sure that they don't do it with American tax dollars, which should only be used for building illegal settlements and killing Arabs.
The best line is where Microsoft criticizes OpenOffice as having "the features of Office 97 at best". What, Office 97 wasn't good enough? Now they admit it!
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....
Palestinians also announced migration to both Open Office and KOffice.
When asked for comment Mr Arafat said "the Israeli and Palestinian people can't agree on much but one thing we see eye to eye on is that Microsoft is an evil behemoth and needs to be stopped."
Many are optimistic that the new Open Source philsophy in the Middle East could one day help bridge the gap between two peoples and lead to peace.
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
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.
"There is absolutley NO Open Source in Baghdad!"
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
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.
The specific office moving to OO do not maintain their own computers. They are on contract from IBM, and IBM preferred OO to Word.
The contract is global, and the ministry does not pay more (or less) because of it. MS received quite some scorn over that, as their initial press release was claiming this is going to cost 50$/station. When the correction came in that OO was used rather than star office, their corrected response was seeked. They declined to comment.
Another twist is that the Mac angle was not raised, not even once. I believe The Register put it in because they were the first to flag that.
Hmmmm.. nice read... so, in Israel, you install the Service Pack first, then Windows?;-)
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
Why don't you label the OOo CD as Office XP Service Pack CD and charge $10 for it? You could rake in a bit in your locality!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
From the announcement:
According to the guidelines set by our legal department, we cannot release the full product, so we have built a set of diff source files and associated documentation.
I'm kinda confused by this one... Why couldn't they release the full source code? Is there anything stopping somebody from distributing the source after applying the diffs?
-mo
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And you must be American, filled with myths about the Europeans being this way or the other.
I have some news for you. Europe has a huge population, violently pro-US (UK et al), neutral, slightly anti-US (France). Same thing with the feelings towards the Israeli/Palestine conflict, with a tendency to be critical of brutality, which can be found on both sides, but sanctioned among the Israeli and frowned upon by the Joe Palestinian.
Since you don't read newspapers, even Bush and Blair condemn Israel's violence and humiliation tactics. What does your comment make you? Both uneducated AND unaware of your favourite president's view on the issue.
I must say it warms my heart - but I'm a bit pessimistic, you see ... Israel has got some of the best politicians money can buy; And, judging from the enthusiastic appearance of two of our ministers in Microsoft's latest "microsoft in the government expo" in Italy, I think Microsoft Israel is well aware of the commodity status of Israeli politicians.
Well, that's pretty much it, except I would use the word "rational" instead of (sic) "genious".
science can answer all problems to include the meaning of life
Wrong. I'm a scientist and science tells me only about the nature - nothing more, nothing less.
I choose to believe that there is no meaning of life, there is no fundamental right or wrong, love is only a biochemical reaction in the brain and that consciousness does not survive beyond death. Nothing I see or hear tells me anything else, so it would be irrational to think otherwise.
The owls are not what they seem
If you know the origin of the Zealots, then your comment isn't quite as dumb. The Zealots ( led by Barabbas) were fighting Roman tyranny, and Israel is currently fighting the Microsoft monopoly.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
"The employment agency has selected an immature and unproven software package and its functionality is at the best close to Office 97", said Microsoft representatives. What exactly does this mean for Office97? It had no feature like PDF-Export or XML-Support - but was far more immature than OO?
OpenOffice.org is not slow - takes time to start but later on works OK. It's not bloatware either. Insert image of tens of KB in size into oowriter and save the result in MS Word format. Check the document size - it'll be around the size of the image itself. Now do the same using MS Office 2000. How many MB is that .doc big now?
I meant in terms of plain features, but just so you know, I did your .DOC test with MS Word, and a 30 KB image saved into a 45 KB document. Mind you, that's still a little big, but nowhere near the MB you mention.
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.
.ppt and MS Office had no problem opening that. Very impressive.
The other day, I recieved a PowerPoint that MSOffice couldnt open, OpenOffice opened it, exported back to
But thats for work, at home I save money and use OpenOffice/Mozilla.
To me science tells about how nature works. Natural science limits itself to questions which can be falsified, ie. proven wrong. Beyond those, my personal beliefs are not limited to or by the natural science.
For instance, those three points are not falsifiable by the natural science and are therefore out of science's jurisdiction. Therefore I cannot "know" them and that's why in my original post I used to the word "believe".
But yes, I also believe that religions are inherently dangerous, should not have any place in the infrastructure (government, military, schools,...) of a modern society and should be weeded out by time.
The owls are not what they seem
European Union: 380+ million
India: 1.05 billion
China: 1.27 billion (American billion = 10^9)
It looks like you're trying to migrate away from Microsoft Office. What would you like me to do?
Hit the big red switch and give you a few minutes to reconsider?
Remind you that Bill 0wnz j00?
Send an MS FUD press release to The Register.
Commit harikari?
That last one is one I have been waiting a long time for Clippy to offer to do.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
You need to perform voodoo and raise the dead to be able to add page numbers to your documents in OpenOffice. In MS Office it's just one click away.
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.
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:
.. yes. Office suites that attempt to open MS Office formats.
.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.
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
Once Microsoft uses the DRM-enforcing Fritz chip (which, according to the DMCA legislation, must be present in your computer) to encode their
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.
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The statement can be read both ways.
The day will come when people buy software for reasons other than utility: fashion, conspicuous consumption, political affiliation... but today it's simply a matter of price and functionality.
Microsoft can say what they like, but very few people will try OOo and then MSOffice and then choose to pay for MSOffice with their own money simply because of a sound bite.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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]
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...
In USA, monkeys are running the country.
USA is great!
Sure it is. Religion is a series of strongly held beliefs based on faith (i.e. no or little scientific proof) usualy (but not always) centered arround a belief in a higher authority.
Atheism is the belief that said higher authority does not exist. Atheism in and of itself however is a leap of faith, because there is no evidence that a higher authority doesn't exist.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Many are optimistic that the new Open Source philsophy in the Middle East could one day help bridge the gap between two peoples and lead to peace.
Unless palestinian coders are using emacs, and israeli coders are using vi, that is.
In that case there will never be peace...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
>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
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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable -- John F. Kennedy
United States stopped military/financial support for Israel. They will continue providing moral support though.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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--
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
I belief the burden of proof is upon those who propose the existence of some unmeasurable things. You might as well take the leap of faith to NOT believe it when I tell you that I talk to angels.
OpenOffice is totally missing VB macro virus support. Microsoft really have been the pioneers in bringing the virus to places its never been before.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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. .docs which are some bastardized... thing.)
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
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
What does the regime of Israel has to do with adoption of OSS in it's goverment and army?
That would be like someone will say they don't want to use Microsoft Windows (or Red Hat Linux for that matter), because they are US companies, and it has a certain regime in Iraq or somewhere else. (Actually, what you saying to even less logical, since you don't have to support someone to support their move to OO, if you support OO).
If you have a problem with an article about the IDF being posted of \. because of what they do, you have a serious problem, and it's no surprise the comment is posted anonymously. But what's the actual problem with a government moving to OO?, being one of many governments planning to do similar steps, which is what the story is about.
150 staff to remain on MS Office? Can you say "manager"?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Except you forget (or are unaware) that many thinkers of that era (including Galileo and Newton, among others) studied the world around them in a scientific manner because they believe God was rational and would create things in a logical way. The advancement of science was because of their religious faith. The bible says to "love the Lord your God with all your mind" as well as heart, soul, and strength. God has never asked for mindless unthinking devotion.
Constitutionally Correct
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I have been looking at OO to replace Office 2000 at my workplace and I just gotta wonder what the hell you have been smoking...
1. Speed: There's no point in being 100% compatible with MS Office, if it's 200% slower
In my tests, there were in most cases no speed penalty. It seems to take longer to load ONLY when MS's utility to load most of the components for Office at boot (located in the Startup folder)is loaded. We have to disable this because it causes other applications we use to crash and uses far too many resources (which may be part of the reason for crashes). When this is disabled, load times are virtually identical.
When up and running, I see no speed difference on the 733/128M test machine I have been using.
2. Bloated: Same as MS Office.
Huh? the download file for OO 1.1 is 73Mbytes. The service pack SR1a for Office 2000 is 50 Mbytes.
3. No option to install a dumbed-down version.
The only reason I install limited versions of Office 2000 is because of the insane disk requirements for the entire package and the fact that we don't use Outlook for security reasons or Clippy for sanity reasons. As mentioned above, when the entire download is only 73 Mbytes, I don't feel so limited with OO. I can download and install OO in less time than Office takes to install from CD.
Now, all that being said, we still have some issues with OO. Our existing product manuals are all written in Word. They don't all translate cleanly; mostly formatting issues in the headers and footers. However, I gotta mention that these were similar to the issues we had when we moved from Office 97 to Office 2000.
Have you actually installed and run Office and OO on the same machine and compared them head-to-head? The first 3 items in your list would seem to indicate that you have not.
"MSWord gives you a default filename based on the first few words in the document when you save a new file."
you call that a feature? i always give it a different filename, usually b/c the auto-names suck--the first line of what i write genereally isn't the most intuitive or memerable thing about my file.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
Man, that's amazing. I can think of a a few employees where I work that I'd like to replace with OO as well. I'm sure a couple could even be replaced with a very small shell script.
Wow, since Office XP is pretty similar to Office 2000, which really wasn't much of an improvement over Office 97, plus the fact that I don't think I've ever used a feature in Office XP that wasn't in Office 97, I'd say MS just landed a ringing endorsement of Open Office!
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
First, let me say to everyone who decided to give this discussion a political bent, "Go Fuck Off!"
Second, Microsoft Office supports Hebrew brilliantly well. Much of the development for left-to-right language support for Microsoft apps is done in Haifa.
I've followed OO Hebrew support for a number of years and it never could compete with Microsoft Office. Two years ago, after the IDF signed a $125 million deal with Microsoft, the Israeli Ministry of Finance finally got fed up. The government in general, with MOF backing, decided to take some of our many, many post bubble unemployed developers and pay them to improve Hebrew support for OO. Now it's ready. So this announcement is nothing to be surprised about. It's been in the works for a long time.
Congratulations to the Open Source Community.
PS Hebrew Mozilla on Windows is really great too.
Each side believes that it is right. However, when Israelis shoot at Arabs on the ground with U.S.-made helicopter gunships, and everyone in the U.S., Europe, and Arab lands see that on TV, it plays badly, very badly. No matter who is right, it looks bad.