I think every government is at least toying with the idea of open source - as long as it remains a small project, MS isn't going to worry, but what will happen when more and more national and local governments make the switch? It will be interesting to see what MS does.

they'll lower the price and offer more incentives -- but that's not working, either.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13350

Yes i heard that china, japan and Korea are making their on OS from open source, that's over a billion people in those countries alone, and china's middle class is growing all the time. A big boost for open source, while M$ keeps going like it is, with it's current business attitude and practices. more and more institutions will go to open source.

Heck, even some of the school districts here in Oregon are starting to eyeball open-source products as well. It couldn't come at a better time; the state of Oregon is in a "budget crisis" (funny though they still have enough money to hire a Klingon-language interpreter ).

Well I just think you're all biased.

I would love to be able to pay Mr Gates hundreds of ?????????* per year, cos I think that he's really wonderful generous and an all round good egg. :P



Happy new year/Shalom

regards

John

* - insert currency of choice

Shalom to you too, John.

easter egg, maybe?

Whatever gave you that idea?????

(of course I'm being a smarta$$ )

Yep. Future versions of Office may not contain support for some character sets, Hebrew being one of them.

And the version(s) of ms software that government organizations get differ vastly from what the average consumer gets. While not open, the code is adjusted and available to suit security needs of the customer, MS might be greedy, but they aren't stoopid :-) The only reasons their products exist are it's saleability and marketing. If MS needs the income from Israel or any other country/large corporation they'll adapt anything required to get it. If they don't feel the need for their business, they cut features and support and ignore past and likely future customers. Whore-mongering is a standard business practice now-a-days.

i usually don't bash MS, I think they make the right product for many different scenarios. Middle aged women that sit in the secritarial pool and chat on AOL should be using an NT workstation with Word2000 on it. It's simply the most cost-effective. But things like this boil my blood a bit. MS too often shows an I don't care attitude that not only affects their reputation, but end of year profits and thus my stock portfolio. Now put the Hebrew and lesser used asian characters back into office, and make solitaire and Excel look more attractive to Joe-Blow-IT-Buyer-Guy so my stock spilts again!

I dont know about Israels case,but in other cases where countries/states turn to open source,they(MS) desperately tries to win back them.Afterall,it was in one particular deal with Russia that they(MS) agreed to provide a part of source code.
And the ease of use.Many are very much satisfied with MS products.(Ofcourse,MS can hire the brightest,and therefore there employees wont be dumb(as often told in this site) and the software they have written wont be that useless).
But MS can never afford to make their products open source.As a matter of fact,most MNCs survive on greed.Literally,Greed is the basis of capitalism.
OSS can compete with patented software in terms of Quality,Price and more importantly,openness.

hhmph... you got that right. you know Murphy's Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules - same here.

Money, money, and money................

Well,I am being frank.I am not an anti-capitalist or socialist,and i believe in a fair amount of greed is essential for growth.But in my opinion the Secondary (Stock)Market is similar to a casino.And large corporates are a bit too much greedy.

Well done ChasidishHarry and Dhimani,

You are living proof that irony and sarcasm, are alive and well on the western side of the Atlantic.

Though I do think that arunshivanandan needs a little help just to include a few more links in his sig :P

But just to point out that I'm not a total philistine, I will follow this with a quote from one of the larger "linux brains" at my LUG, that I'm in total agreement with.

Happy New Year

regards

John

Yay!
just have to convince the school: Problem: "but what happens if stuff goes wrong? who will fix it?" and "if we shouldn't do microsoft, why can't we just get a mac? they look cooler." and I will be able to show em that not only geeks do it!
Go Israel!

titanium_geek

Fascinating. I don't know where you get your information from, but I know for a fact that MS spends a huge amount of money trying to support languages other than English.

The current set of MS Office apps all support most languages/character sets natively. I can input Hebrew or Arabic trivially in Office XP.

So exactly what do you mean that they "may not contain support"? They probably will drop support for *charsets*, as they are trying to make everything Unicode. But that is mostly a Good Thing.

They are not "vastly" different, they are simply tailored to specific needs. Just like anyone who wanted to cement a deal would do, they try to make their customers happy.

As I said, the support is there. I use it all the time...

Different countries have been ditching MS for years. With their "pay a license for every computer no matter if it runs Windows, MAC, Linux, or anything else" they have made a lot of enemies. The best anti-Microsoft campaigner is Microsoft.