Suddenly, competition is in (Haaretz)

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.

Clearly it undermines the credibility of OOo and open source software in general if we promulgate the notion that there is not real appeal and value proposition inherent in the software; that it's best used to pressure Microsoft.

How can we debunk or substantiate these claims. Clearly the officials involved would not admit to the prevarication (that would undermine their own alleged purpose). On the other had their denials are futile. If we're willing to entertain the possibility that they're telling one lie we have to admit that they would then be obligated to public support that lie with others.

Overall I think its bad journalism to make these assertions parts of the headlines. It seems reasonable to cite any credible claims (even anonymously); but only if the claims ARE CREDIBLE.

Personally I think we will see wholesale adoption of OOo (possibly OOo on MS Windows) over the next year. By the end of 2004 I think it will heat from from the current sparks and embers into a full conflagration. There are just too many dollars, yen, rubles, rupees, euros and pounds at stake in too many corners of the world.

That transition will be painful. This is an unprecented shift. It's not a "paradigm" shift by any stretch of the imagination. The paradigm is the same as transitions from Lotus 123 .DIF and Word Perfect .DOC formats; it's just that the scale is different by about 2 orders of magnitude. (The number of documents and the number of personal computers a decade or so ago compared to the 100s of millions of PCs and billions of documents).

In retrospect I think we may see that the delay in the emergence of a "paperless office" hasn't so much been a result of blind adherence to custom or any unreasoning technophobia as, perhaps, a gut level understanding that words and numbers on paper can, if all all fails, be re-typed.

Perhaps the establishment of truly open and stable file formats will finallly allow us to make real progress in that arena.

Jim

A recent update in the Israeli media reveals a letter from the Israeli M$ office to the MoF. In the letter M$ offers to lower prices by means of "fine tuning" the software bundle they offer to each government office. The letter also calls for a meeting of MoF representatives with the VP of M$ Europe for "discussing the options of the government".

Previosuly the deal was, more or less, all of M$ stuff for a fixed $177 per seat per year. This included not only the workstation side but also the server parts (eg. Exchangle, SQL) as well. Now M$ is saying "maybe you don't need all our stuff so there's room for discounts".

There was another report, a few days ago, that M$ unofficialy offered that government offices report lower number of seats than they really have, in order to lower total cost. This would have been a smart move on M$ given the uphill battle ahead: On the one hand the customer (governemnt) is in a vulnerable position as it's always in a breach of contract. On the other hand M$ doesn't lower prices, which usually invites another round of discount pressures from the business sector and maybe other governments.

Apparently the offer was turned down, which I think is a real pitty. If it were to work this way, then M$ would have no legal basis to demend anyone actually pay for their products: if they allow the government to pirate, no judge in his/her right mind would ever convict any other user for doing the same.

Of course M$ denied it ever hinted at such a direction, but this last update shows that M$ is under pressue and exploring ways of lowering the price. In an ideal world I'd be really happy that my taxes are better utilized, but I know the money will just go to some other redundant public spending. It's half comfort at least that M$ will get much less of it.

Eyal.