Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Dotan Cohen]

2012/2/5 Mordechai Behar <mordecha.behar at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> 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.

In mechanical engineering at the Technion we had access to MSDAA, but
Office was not included. Everything else, including Windows 7, was.


> The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted software,
> I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS.

I cannot find details about this. If you can, I would love to know. My
wife is a therapist and gets some Department of Education benefits,
such as a reduced interest loan at Mosad.


> 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.
>

I've been active for years, writing to websites and other entities.
Instead of organising, we are better off being disparate in my
opinion. If Ofek receives a letter per week requesting Firefox
support, that is more convincing than a letter from some unknown
organisation complaining about freedom.


-- 
Dotan Cohen

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