Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Mordechai Behar]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Micha <michf at post.tau.ac.il> wrote:

> On 05/02/2012 14:14, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to
> convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> >> student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook
> >> (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale
> >> for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license.
> >>
> >> Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a
> >> netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,
> >> there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places
> >> like Machsani Chasmal.
> >
> > I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office
> > cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I
> > quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this
> > actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels,
> > and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more
> > than one machine anyway).
> >
> > The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels.
> >
> > So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the
> cheapest
> > brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow.
> >
> > I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure
> > group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly)
> > discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children
> > themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense,
> > given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at
> > school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal.
> >
> >> No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a
> >> webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.
> >
> > And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they
> > spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and
> > connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever
> > they can.
> >
>
> I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but
> I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free
> license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax
> that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and
> tablets (android, ipad).
>
> Not sure if it's this link or something else:
> https://www.dreamspark.com/
> Although this seems to be just developer tools.
>
> Those are just developer tools, and even then, only a few institutions in
Israel are accepted as viable places of study that will allow a student to
download the software.
A better system is the MSDAA (Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance) which
allows a student who is registered for specific courses in specific
institutions to download and use nearly every Microsoft application,
including the actual operating system and office suite. However, to the
best of my knowledge this is only available to compsci and computer
engineering students at Hebrew University.
The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted
software, I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS. But when we bought
Windows 7 from them (for our home computer since my mother, a teacher,
needs to use a program that will only run on Windows in order to submit
grades) it came only as an upgrade, not a full license. That was also 100
NIS.
I think there are other organizations and institutions that provide such
large, or larger, discounts on MS software, but that just makes it worse
IMO. It sort of broadens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Although in this case it's those that have or have not kombinot.

I think that the length and speed of growth of this thread points to just
how frustrated we all are at the current situation. So why don't we change
it? We happen to have Hamakor, a registered nonprofit organization to
promote the use of free and open source software in Israel. So why not
start some kind of campaign? A public message? People are still riled up
about the social protests of the past summer, we could ride that wave.



> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20120205/0c4203f4/attachment.html>