Slashdot Mirror
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'."
Not to the start a flamewar on the subject of Arab-Israeli relations, but just imagine the impact if the U.S. gov't did this! I'd start getting .sxc as attachments instead of .doc! Then, the economically challenged could buy a cheap PC, or get one used from a church or something, and immediately make it more useful!
You are not the customer.
From the Article:
The ministry is aware that despite the substantial savings accrued by not buying Microsoft licenses, there would also be considerable installment costs.
I have installed Open Office, Star Office, Word Perfect Office and Microsoft Office for various clients over the past two years. Maybe I'm missing something about a large scale deploy, but they all seem about the same for installation. I can even use SMS to drop the package automatically. Any idea what they are talking about?
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
A lot of people will dismiss this as a "whoop-tee-doo" gesture and that would be an expected knee-jerk reaction. The thing here is that one must consider the source -- WHO is giving the stuff away. It's not the same as me burning a hundred OSS cd's and leaving them out for people to take. This is a GOVERNMENT entity doing this, and thus has more "umph" to it.
This is most definitely a good thing.
Yes, indeed, computers are cheaper than MS Office. I'm typing this on a 433 Celeron-based machine which I will probably be selling in the next few days for less than $100. It runs OpenOffice 1.1 just fine.
As you say, there are lots of people out there with all sorts of software loaded on their machines. But much of it is illegal, so there are hidden costs. People lose respect for copyright laws. The laws themselves become more draconian, in order to crack down on widespread piracy. New players like OO.o are shut out of the market because there is an entire segment of the population where "free as in beer" confers no competitive advantage.
In short, widespread piracy distorts copyright law and locks out competition. Despite the problems with copyright law, we do need it. If a "free as in legal" product can be had that has 90% of the functionality of MS Office, then it is irresponsible to use "closing the digital divide" as an excuse for encouraging piracy.
Especially if half of the remaining 10% is Clippy.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!