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Israel's Finance Ministry To Distribute OpenOffice
dudeman2 writes "Israel National News reports that The Israel Finance Ministry said Sunday it will begin distributing Open Office for free as of next week. The ministry said that it would begin to distribute thousands of Open Office CD-ROMs at public computer centers and later on at community centers throughout the country, 'in a bid to reduce the technological gap between the rich and poor in Israel'."
The Scots got there first...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34593.html
Israel National News, or Arutz Sheva (Channel 7) as it's more commonly known, is a heavily right wing biased media outlet whose management was recently sentenced to various prison terms for operating an illegal radio station.
More details here
It's an odd source for tech news.
if i recall correctly, the problem was the Mac version of Office not providing Hebrew support. OS X provides quite rich hebrew support in their libraries, so the technical barriers to a Hebrew Mac Office were perceived to be quite low, nobody is sure why MS wouldn't do it. There were no plans for adding it either. The Israeli government offered to pay for programmer time to add support but MS still refused.
This is where the Office monopoly started to look sour, it looked like MS was not going to do a Hebrew Mac Office "just because. Buy Windows." This demonstrated the effects of monopoly lock in and led to the search for alternatives.
It was a simple format document so the moral of the story is... You still need to SAVE AS RTF!!!!
Or state that the file is in OpenOffice format. Mailing documents to people without telling them what to use is somewhat rude, even if it is a common document. There are plenty of people out there who don't have ANY Office software, and/or even know what a ZIP file is.
Get in the habit. A simple "Here's your document is OpenOffice format" goes a lot farther than "Here's your document."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
When we moved our administration/secretarial staff onto OpenOffice it took about half an hour per worker to get them familiar with the basic differences. It also degraded productivity significantly for a couple of days as each worker got used to the different ways of doing things.
Many of these more experienced users also used some Macros and links to Access databases which entailed some time and effort to work around.The process was quicker for workers with less experience with MS Office, but then those users were much less productive when it comes to word-processing etc. so it was difficult to tell if they were having any additional problems with OpenOffice.
Our move entailed a half an hours workplace training, which meant half an hours of the trainers time and half an hour of the admin worker's time, plus an unquantified loss of efficiency for a couple of days.
On our salary scales it would come to a minimum cost of 10 pounds per worker, although with loss of productivity it could easily be 50 pounds depending on how slow the worker was to adapt. If you scale these kinds of costs up for thousands of users then you have a significant issue.
We made the move in order to stop using unauthorised copies, so it was cheaper than going legit by buying the correct MS Licenses, but if the Isreali Government already has the correct Licenses then there may be minimal short term savings, indeed there is probably a significant short term cost to be justified.
You may find unofficial translations of the GPL into Hebrew at law.co.il and guides.co.il.
Take an OpenOffice.org Writer file (SXW). Rename the file to have the extension SXC. (For OOo Calc -- the spreadsheet.)
Now open it.
It opens as a Writer document just fine.
All OOo documents use the same XML structure. Based on some information in the META-INF directory, OOo is able to deduce that the top level of the document should open in Writer.
What do I mean by all this META-INF nonsense? Try this experiment: take any OOo document and rename it's extension (from SXC, SXW, etc.) to ZIP. Now unzip it. You get a Content.xml file, a META-INF folder, and other goodies if your document contained embedded pictures, etc.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.