Open Source in Israeli Schools

Posted on September 3, 2007 by Guy Snir
Filed Under Open Source, Microsoft, Israel, Education |

The very popular news site ynet.co.il ran an article about Open Source penetration in Israeli schools (in Hebrew).

Since most of you do not read Hebrew I will try to summarize the main points of the article:

Even though the Israeli Ministry of Education puts much emphasis on Microsoft products (i.e. Teaching Excel as part of the curriculum, publishing a tender for on-line remote education requiring support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (in Hebrew) while not mentioning international standards (or Firefox) and offering school faculty near free Microsoft products (in Hebrew)), Open Source activists are beginning to make a change in this scene.

Among the sample stories mentioned in the article you can find the story of Blich, a famous school in Ramat-Gan where 2 16 year old students and the school’s IT staff have replaced an outdated proprietary portal with Drupal (while at the same time a project to implement Microsoft SharPoint failed), another prestigious school Ohel-Shem has a team of students running and maintaining the school’s Open Source based portal, they even created an internal PHP course. The schools head of teleprocessing says they did not have any backup from the Ministry of Education but managed to save a lot of money anyway.

The author continues with a description of more sample projects: Extremadura in Spain and creating Linux classrooms in Israel (2005, in Hebrew).

The founder of VAYA Research Center for Free and Open Source Software that deals with OSS and education, mentions that “Open Source and Free Software is about a lot more than software. It is an entire culture of conduct in the internet, of freedom, excellence and transparency. Important values that students should get in school”.

One of the comments mentioned that the Eagle Israel company is running Linux projects in 8 schools in Petach-Tikwa.

Update: Lior Kaplan, a prominent member of the Israeli Open Source community, sent me an email with some more information on this topic, check it out here (in Hebrew).

You will find there a link to a presentation by Lior Kaplan on the Extremadura Project (in Hebrew) and a news video in English on the project.

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Comments

10 Responses to “Open Source in Israeli Schools”

  1. Amit Deshpande on September 3rd, 2007 2:08 pm

    It was nice hear about the Open Source initiative in Israel. Open source is also making considerable penetration into the Indian IT market. Refer http://www.amit-deshpande.com/2007/08/tcs-joins-open-source-initiative.html for details. The revised educational syllabus now contains courses related to Linux and PHP and not just the usual Microsoft stuff.

  2. Guy Snir on September 3rd, 2007 5:04 pm

    Amit,

    Thank you for the update. I think that the Open Source penetration into the Indian market is very interesting and important, and I guess that TCS is a great place for it to start.

    I hope (and am pretty sure) that many will follow.

    (BTW: Found a post by Michael Tiemann about this http://opensource.org/node/186)

    Guy

  3. One small step… | Open Source Guy on September 4th, 2007 6:17 am

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  4. Eddy Nigg on September 4th, 2007 10:44 pm

    Penetration of open source in Israel is very slow. One of the reasons for it is the language barrier and some lack of support for the Hebrew language in OSS. The additional hurdle for Right-to-Left support makes it more difficult for developers. Take Thunderbird for example, where the latest Hebrew version is blocked by one bug, depending on a RTL issue.
    Also the mentality is slowly changing and opening up to alternatives to Microsoft products, there is still a long way to go (comparing to Europe - Germany in particular), because casual users in Israel are hardly capable to handle their current computers (in Hebrew). That’s at least how I see the picture…

  5. Guy Snir on September 5th, 2007 3:25 am

    Hi Eddy,

    Thanks for the comment. I think penetration should be measured by segments:

    1) In the personal computer / software segment, I definitely agree with you that penetration is slow. In some part it might be due to RTL and Hebrew issues, but I also think that there is still a lot of FUD going around (i.e. in the ynet.co.il story I mention, one of the comments says Open Source software generally looks like a high school graduation project…)

    2) In the Enterprise Information Software (ERP, CRM) segment, penetration is also rather slow, I assume this is related to translation issues and awareness.

    3) In the system / infrastructure segment I find that the penetration is rather good and it is growing. Other than Linux, Apache, Tomcat, etc. which have become obvious choices in some places, I am seeing implementations of BI solutions, Monitoring software, Development frameworks and so on.

  6. Guy Snir on September 5th, 2007 3:30 am

    BTW Eddy: I just added www.startcom.org to my list of Israeli Open Source Companies:

    www.opensourceguy.net/israeli-open-source-companies/

  7. Eddy Nigg on September 5th, 2007 5:31 am

    Cool! ;-)

    Also agreeing on your point 3 from above…

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