[Tech] The Register: Tempi duri per Microsoft in Israele

Come riportato anche da Linux Today, il Ministero del Commercio israeliano ha tagliato i ponti con Microsoft e ha adottato come suite da ufficio OpenOffice, il noto software diffuso sotto licenza GPL.

First out of the door is the Israeli employment agency, which will replace 550 out of 700 users with OpenOffice. The contract represents a hardware win for IBM. Some 150 staff will stay on Microsoft Office. For now, all the switchers will remain on Windows, running the Win32 version of the software libre equivalent of Microsoft Office.

Alquanto scomposta la reazione di Microsoft:

Microsoft reacted scornfully to the decision, the Hebrew-only Daily Mail reports, accusing the Israelis of being tight-fisted.



"The employment agency has selected an immature and unproven software package and its functionality is at the best close to Office 97," said Microsoft representatives.



Accusing the ministry of penny pinching is hardly a promising line of attack, we suggest. Users make rational choices. And Word 97-era functionality is clearly considered good enough for the Israeli ministry of employment.

In questo momento Microsoft non se la sta passando troppo bene, in Israele: a parte quest'ultimo episodio, deve anche fronteggiare l'accusa di essere un monopolio de facto, oltre a tutta una serie di questioni legali:

In a little noticed decision recently, Israel's Antitrust Authority director general, Dror Strum, declared Microsoft a monopoly. Separate civil actions on behalf of open source and Apple advocates are pending; a motion by the former to State Prosecutor Tadmor recently brought to light unpublished decisions by the Antitrust Authority to abide by the US antitrust settlement. The latter followed an outcry by Israel's Macintosh community about Microsoft's failure to support right-to-left languages, such as Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew - in their Macintosh applications. Apple now fully supports right-to-left languages, but there's no sign of Microsoft enabling the feature at the application level. This affects Apple in the Hebrew and in the much larger Arab and Indian markets.

A tutto questo va aggiunto, ciliegina sulla torta, quanto segnalato dal quotidiano Ha'aretz in un articolo intitolato "The IDF is thinking of closing its Windows": anche l'IDF (Israel Defense Forces, l'esercito israeliano) pare in procinto di fare ciao-ciao con la manina:

Colonel Avi Kochba, the new commander of Mamram, the Israel Defense Forces central computer facility, has good news and bad news for Bill Gates. The good news: the army will not abandon Microsoft operating systems and servers in the near future. The bad news: the IDF is beginning to give serious consideration to transferring its data to Linux servers, and managing it there by means of software based on an open source code.

Fonte: The Register.