Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Etzion Bar-Noy wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Because most households in israel do not buy their office...

I was hoping that even if this is true, and everybody knows this is
true, no school principal would dare raise this in his argument...
I am hoping that no principal could condone such illegal activity.

And as a matter of fact, unskilled people who go to a legitimate computer
store to buy their computer (e.g., Ivory where I bought the computers which
I mentioned), do *not* get offered a free, pirated, copy of MS-Office.

If they do ask for MS-Windows and MS-Office, nobody will volunteer to
help them break the law; Rather they will get their price quote jacked
by almost 1,000 shekels - the combined price of both Microsoft products.
To be fair, the total price of a computer and a screen and these two
Microsoft products is now around 2,500 shekels, which might not seem a
lot to most Israelis (who pay more than that on a new phone...), but
if a poor person could actually save 1,000 on that total, or just 500
(with Windows but not Office), it's an outrage not to encourage him to.

Yes, it's posssible that most people are savvy enough to know that if
they need Microsoft office, they shouldn't buy it at the store, and
rather ask their kid (or the neighbor's kid) to install it for them for
free. But knowing this does take some information, which poor people
might not have. And we can end up with the lousy (but unfortunately)
common situation where poor people pay more than rich people for the
same service.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                     Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |My greatest fear is that no-one will
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |remember me after I'm dead - some dead guy