[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > According to the Walla article at: > http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/3/538997 > > The government has agreed on spending 470 Million NIS on projects > "Merkava" and "Memshal Zamin". > > With all the talks about OpenOffice, MS licenses vs. Linux etc. - does > anyone > here have thoughs on the effect of such spending on the ISraeli OpenSource > industry? > > I understand that most of the badget will go to places like IBM or > Matrix, but still > it should create demand for OpenSource skills in many tiers around it, > shouldn't it?
First of all, in the same day, a budget bigger in 4200% than this, was approved for the railway (Rakevet, not Merkava), so this budget is not so big as it looks. Now, please don't confuse between Merkava and Open-Source: Merkava is a huge ERP project, done in SAP. That money goes to licenses of SAP, to a lot of work done by SAP programmers, and to deployment (a major part of the costs). I wish this money would go to Open-Source, but Merkava is a very specific project that has nothing to do with Open-Source. Now one may ask: "Well, so why don't them give this money to developing Open-Source projects rather than to ERP? The answer is simple: ROI. The government is a public organization, and can't give money freely, but only when it is clear that this money is crucial (e.g. medicines), or legally needed (e.g. payoff of American loans), or when there is a clear ROI. Ministry of Finance claims that ERP will save billions, so (at least according to this claim) there is a clear ROI by spending 470M NIS. There is also a clear ROI in developing Open-Source; For example, the government spends $5M for Office, so *if* OpenOffice can replace ALL of the current assets, there will be a nice ROI. But not when the cost is 470M, of course... And nobody promised you that ALL of the current assets will be replaced... Giving big money to Open-Source development (let's say $10M) may be followed even by sues, because the government is a public organization financed by our taxes. So the government did exactly what any of us would do, and budgeted it by a small money. And again - don't confuse ERP with OpenOffice. -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
