Suddenly, competition is in (Haaretz) [LWN.net]

Suddenly, competition is in (Haaretz)

Posted Jan 7, 2004 23:46 UTC (Wed) by eyal (subscriber, #949)
Parent article: Suddenly, competition is in (Haaretz)

If you read this article and didn't really understand what's the point of it - don't worry there's nothing wrong with you. I read it in the original language (Hebrew), which is still better than the English translation, and I'm still not sure what point the reporter is trying to make...

One moment he says that the Ministry of Finance started investing in OpenOffice localization 18 months ago, the next moment he says that now the MoF uses Open Office just as a PR stunt. (I wish the MoF, or any other of the Israeli ministries, would be sophisticated enough for such long term tricks - they aren't.)

Then one moment he criticizes the MoF for enjoying extremely low prices on M$ products, then next moment he criticizes the MoF for not publishing a tender. (I wonder what the point of such tender would be - who else besides M$ can supply M$ software?)

I think the truth is that now with Open Office full Hebrew support (and usable Hebrew support on Linux GUIs is also on the horizon), Israeli customers have a leverage on M$.

But I think this more than just leverage to get a better deal from M$. The vast majority of civil servants use only basic features of Word and Excel. All the governmental system are on mainframes and most of the day desktop PCs are just used as dumb terminals to the MFs.

I think that a switch to Linux + GUI + Open Office + Terminal Emulation can serve perfectly well on at least 50% of public sector desktops. Same is true by the way for the banking and insurance sectors.

I do hope that both the publicity and actual use of Open Source and Free Software in the government will signal application developers that they need to develop for Linux as well. It's about time we feel the blessed influence of Open Source and Free Software here in Israel.

EZ.

(Log in to post comments)

Suddenly, competition is in (Haaretz)

Posted Jan 8, 2004 1:09 UTC (Thu) by cbo (guest, #10418) [Link]

What came out clear to me in the article is that Linux is a tool to get better prices from M$. The aurthor then turns around and says that Linux can't meet the needs of the Isreali ministries which is a lot of FUD(!#$%). He then concludes that the Ministry will eventually end up using M$ software in 2007 because Linux will never be good enough.

Some people just don't understand the GNU/Linux community. They don't understand the software that exists and how they can benefit from it. I think that Linux will continue to mature and grow. It will continue to get attention and it will gain more support from software and hardware vendors. When enough software and hardware vendors make linux software it will be an easy choice to replace windows for Linux. However, by that time every piece of data on your computer will be own by M$ and enforced by their EULA. That is if you continued to invest in linux.