What could you do with 45 million shekels (nearly $12 million at NIS 3.80/dollar)? Retire, probably. But what could you do with that kind of money if you were a government official who had to spend it on the public? Well, let’s see:

1) You could provide 45,000 poor families with 1,000 shekels a month for food and expenses

2) You could pay the rent for a year for 2,000 families (12 months @ $500/month)

3) You could provide a decent paying job for 450 people (annual salary of NIS 100,000 a year)

Or,
4) You could buy licenses for Windows and Microsoft Office for all the computers in Israel’s schools (about 200,000 altogether).

All worthy endeavors, for sure. But some are less worthy than others – like number 4. If the country is in such bad financial straits (which every politician will tell you it is), why not use Linux and OpenOffice instead Windows and MS Office? We have nothing against Microsoft, but when a quarter of the country’s residents are said to be poor, doesn’t it make more sense to use free open source operating systems and office suites, which work just as well as Microsoft’s?

According to this article in Hebrew business daily Calcalist, it comes down to laziness – both on the part of teachers and the Education Ministry, which doesn’t want to “rock the boat” and make teachers learn “new technology,” or seek out technical support from people who know Linux, preferring to stick with what they’re used to. Not that that they get free support from Microsoft for either Windows or Office – for that, they have to hire technical people and pay them separately. That NIS 45,000,000 is just for licenses.

So the next time some politician wails about how poor the country is, just tell him/her you know how to save an easy 45 million shekels – all it takes is having teachers download a free copy of OO (which you really have to look at hard to realize that it’s not MS Office) and installing Linux on their PCs. May I suggest that instead of spending $39.90 on each Windows/Office license (the cost per machine which the NIS 45 million deal works out to), the Education Ministry invest in a few copies of Linux for Dummies for each school!

Note this sentence from the Calcalist article: “The Education Ministry, as far as it is concerned, sees the deal (NIS 45,000,000 for Windows and Office on all of its computers) as a very good one, since all other government ministries are paying $130 for each package.” (!)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under computers, hi-tech, israel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.