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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?"

15 of 611 comments (clear)

  1. IMO by mOoZik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:IMO by rebeka+thomas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Certainly. You can look at it from anywhere between two extremes. "Open Office still does not compete with MS Office feature for feature" and "Open Office is not as bloated as MS Office".

      Not everyone needs all of the features MS Office "Offers". It's just another product with a wide range of features available to users, and it would be insane to suggest every user needed all features.

      More than likely the Israeli decision went to OOo because it contained the right features, or enough of the right ones.

      --
      RST
    2. Re:IMO by croddy · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I'm fairly sure the decision was based on Microsoft's failure to support Hebrew in MS Office for MacOS, despite supporting other right-to-left languages. this was mentioned in another /. story noting that Israel had suspended all contracts with Microsoft.

      I guess MS can't get away with cutting too many corners anymore ...

    3. Re:IMO by October_30th · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Are you trying to say that the ability to import and export documents in different formats is irrelevant and everybody should just use OO instead? "Just forget all those five-year old documents. Who needs to see them anymore"? Your clients/collaborators are using Word and the OO export doesn't work? "It's not OOs fault - it's theirs for not using OO instead of the closed but de facto standard word processor. Refuse to collaborate with them until they 'get it'."

      What dreamland are you living in?

      Functionality is useless if you can't view your old files.

      --
      The owls are not what they seem
  2. Windows Office 97 not good enough for MS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  3. In other news... by burtonator · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. People are stupid by rebeka+thomas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    "The ... agency has selected an immature and unproven software package" could well be applied to anyone looking towards Longhorn.

    Few will make that leap of judgment to understand the hypocrisy.

    --
    RST
  5. 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.

  6. Iraqi defence minister by Pingular · · Score: 5, Funny

    "There is absolutley NO Open Source in Baghdad!"

    --

    When anger rises, think of the consequences.
    Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
  7. Some "behind the scenes" by Sun · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. 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.

  9. Re:OpenOffice.org Imitating MS? by hdparm · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  10. During the install of OO.org by rock_climbing_guy · · Score: 5, Funny
    During the install of OO.org at the Israeli government office, the beast Clippy pops up

    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???
  11. 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...

  12. unless... by danro · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."