<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 6:03 PM, Nadav Har'El <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nyh@math.technion.ac.il">nyh@math.technion.ac.il</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011, Steve G. wrote about "Re: FSF Campaign against Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"":<br>
<div class="im">> at least MS are not openly anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic,<br>
> or anti 'the bad Jews/Israeli'.<br>
<br>
</div>Indeed. I still remember very vividly a meeting held 11 years ago in the<br>
ISOC-IL offices, about the sad state of Hebrew support on the Web.<br>
The conclusion was that, sadly but truely, Microsoft was the only one that<br>
bothered fixing its browser (IE 5, at the time) to support new standards<br>
that will help Israeli users - namely "logical order" Hebrew text (Unicode's<br>
bidi, see <a href="http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-1.html" target="_blank">http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-1.html</a>).<br>
<br>
Our knight in shiny armor, Netscape, did nothing to solve the our (Israelis')<br>
problems, and forced us to use the ridiculous "visual order" method.<br></blockquote><div><br>Yeah, but Netscape was far from being a knight.<br> Royalty free browser is fine, support over more than one OS even better, but that's not free software.<br>
Uncontrolled race of un-standardized/half-baked html "extensions" - as bad as their competitor, if not worse.<br>It only donned armor on its deathbed (by freeing the code and forming Mozilla).<br>מודה ועוזב ירוחם<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Mozilla, the recently announced free spin-off from Netscape, also didn't help.<br></blockquote><div><br>Takes time for new FOSS project to digest a large inherited codebase (and weren't they busy with infrastructure work, such as XUL, at the time?)<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
IBM, that volunteered to solve this problem in Netscape, proposed a patch,<br>
but Netscape didn't even care enough about us Israelis to apply it.<br>
It would take several more years until Isralis finally had a free browser that<br>
supported logical-order (bidi) Hebrew.<br>
<br>
So despite all its other flaws, Microsoft does indeed care about Israel and<br>
Israelis.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div> </div><div>People care. Corporations seek profit for investors. Some people would argue that this is more a virtue than a flaw.<br><br></div><br></div></div>