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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.
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!
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.
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....
Huh? OOo has quite a number of features that AbiWord lacks. And some of them will be important to large users.
AbiWord is fine for simpler documents though.
I *do* agree that Gnumeric is great, and it's prettier than OOo Calc.
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?
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.
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???
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.
-
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...
> I'm a bit pessimistic, you see
Too bad US law doesn't allow us to shop overseas; we're spending a mighty lot of money to buy third rate ones...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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."
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.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
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.