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Israel Suspends MS Office Purchases For Now
case_igl writes "The Seattle Times is reporting 'that in an apparent showdown over price, Israel's government has suspended purchases of Microsoft Office software and is encouraging the development of an open-source alternative.' The Finance Ministry has cooperated with Sun Microsystems and IBM in designing the Hebrew-language version of OpenOffice software, a freely distributed open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing applications. Microsoft representatives in Israel did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment." The Associated Press article is carried on many other sites as well.
Nah, coding is easy.
What's interesting is if this is just a bargaining chit being used by israel to make MSFT drop thier price, Just like Thailand did!
Use the promotional code "LINUX" and get thousands off your Microsoft installation costs!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Once we see what the Israeli government deploy on their desktops we will know if this is for real, or just a crude negotiation technique.
More power to them! Microsoft Word's default Hebrew fonts are non-existent, and the alternative Hebrew fonts aren't very good. Nor are any of the office products very good at inputing right-to-left text. I hope the improvements to openoffice will make their way to other countries.
I would assume that the main benefits would be of most use to (in order):
Other Semitic languages such as Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopian
Other right-left languages, such as Farsi.
Noticing a pattern here... Ironically enough, these improvements are likely to help develop the software for those that Israel considers to be their enemies (the Arab world and Persia, being Iran and parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan).
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
The Israeli political system is paralized when it comes to peace, IMO, due to the low margin (2%) that parties need in order to qualify for the Knesset. This is why the current gov't is so dependent on the radical right-wing parties such as the National Religious Party (which many Israelis regard as fascist). Yet they are not stupid, and this unilaterial suggestion on their part has been a long time coming (if you read the Israeli press, you should have seen it at least a year ago, if not more).
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments. Hell, as an American, I don't have much respect for MY government! But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Is the money that I make forcing people to buy things that they don't need (for example, an entire office license if all they need is Outlook) worth the money that I lose when people start flocking to free alternatives when they don't like I'm offering?
Microsoft (or any company for that matter) stands on very shaky ground when the market starts going in a different direction and they refuse to be flexible. This is just like the RIAA and file sharing. If the RIAA in the mid 90's when CD burners were about to hit the market had dropped the price of CD's, and offered a legitimate electronic distribution method, things like Napster would not have been such a big hit. They created unrest in the market by not being flexible and giving people what they want to buy, for the price they want. The same thing is now happening to MS. What does MS office have that OpenOffice doesn't? Nothing that mattered to Israel. So when they were forced to pay for something they didn't want or need, they looked for an alternative and found it.
Unless MS shapes up this will continue to happen and happen more rapidly. Mac OS, Linux, and all other *NIX will only gain market share as they become the viable alternative.
Just compare some of the licensing of Mac OS to MS. The new, fully loaded version of OSX? ~$130. The new fully loaded version of Windows XP? ~$200. The new fully loaded version of OSX Server? ~$1000 for unlimited users. The new fully loaded Windows server 2003? ~$4000 with 25 users. And that is not to mention Linux which is fully loaded for free!
They can't sustain this for long before something breaks.
SCO.com uses Linux
that's precisely the problem .. only a few fonts .. for years Microsoft has been stripping down the Unicode set for many languages and effectively restricting what can be developed within their core O/S and "productivity" products .. Hence a fresh start with OpenSource allows *many* more developers and native speakers within a country develop their own fonts and contribute them back in to lower level applications.
(1) Are you claiming that the murders were part of a Palestinian conspiracy? Because usually, the people promising peace are not the people doing the murdering. Is that the case here? "The Palestinians" are no more a united, homogenous group than are "The Israeli Jews".
(2) Why were the Hebron settlers murdered, and were their murderers brought to justice by any common, civilised sense of the term? What often happens is that in the understandable thirst for retribution, the actual reasons for the violence are trivialised, and the social order is suspended or abandoned- which only helps bring about more violence.
Bundling is just another word for profit maximizing. Microsoft makes more money by bundling, even just slightly. The newspaper example is best used. A wants just the sports section and is willing to pay 30c for it. B just wants entertainment & the front section and wants to pay 40c for it. If each of them buy it, they may 70c total, but if they can charge 50c for both people, they make a dollar.
The point is that Microsoft is trying to milk everyone for more than they're worth. Israel isn't doing anything wrong beyond saying "why are we choosing Microsoft if their support is sub-par. Why shouldn't we find a better prices solution that is completely compatible". Microsoft has to be competative (with free) or convince more lemmings to follow them off the cliff.
-M