Among their new activities PerformanceSense will also lead the technical activities for Birt, the Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools system, which Actuate originally sponsored and still develops and supports.

Source BubbleTech (in Hebrew)

The contract is for 1.5 million Euro’s part of which comes from the European Union. Traffix is reported to be part of a project were mobile telephone customers will be able to dynamically decide which mobile carrier to use.

Traffix’s main product is OpenBlox, which is an Open Source implementation of the 3GPP and 3GPP2 Diameter specifications.

Speculations are that Sun is planned to deliver Open Source computing solutions, including support and implementation for Open Office and Linux on a few thousand computers during the first phase. Sun will also assist in training teachers and building new Computer Labs.

Yuli Tamir, the Minister of Education, was quoted saying that this move will expose the teachers and the students to advanced technologies.

Related Posts:

• Is OpenOffice.org.il Dead?
• Open Source in Israeli Schools

Source: Lior Kaplan

Bezeq will supply the PC’s exclusively until April, and the Eee’s will be provided with Windows XP.

In April the Eee will be available through other retailers and will be installed with Xandros.

[via Lior Kaplan]

The current support that the Hebrew version of OpenOffice is getting from the Israeli Ministry of Finance ends this month. As a consequence, the company currently maintaining OpenOffice.org.il, TK Open Systems Ltd., announced yesterday that the project is taking a hiatus with no known date as to when the project will become active again.

The practical aspects of this means that until proper funding is found no bugs will be solved, phone support will not be available and the forums will be locked.

Jonathan Ben-Avraham, CEO of TK Open Systems, updated that efforts are being made to secure funds for next year, but that the source has not been found yet. According to Ben-Avraham the Ministry of Finance has not made a formal decision to cease its support for the project, but internal conflicts among the different government agencies is causing the current freeze.

Boaz Dolev, the manager of the government’s Tehila Project (that funded the Hebrew OpenOffice until now), claims he is optimistic. Dolev says that a committee will start working on this subject in March, and he believes that the proper funding will be found.

This is another example of the delicate and important relationship between the government and the Open Source community.

The site is in Hebrew, and backed by the http://linux-israel.net team.
They offer free support in the forums or paid support from the company.

Lets hope this with improve the Linux efforts in Israeli Schools.

Zeev contacted me to help spread the word for a project he is looking to sponsor called “gKiosk”. gKiosk is intended to be a Gnome Photo Kiosk.

Although this is a product with a small niche, any new Open Source project is a good thing (in my opinion).

If you want to see the details and/or bid on the project, you can find it here.

For the Israeli part of the story, Zeev is Israeli and OSP, an Israeli company, is one of the bidders.

Good luck to all!

Guy

According to the vague claims in the statement, the companies plan on developing “tools and business intelligence” that would not necessarily be proprietary…

Source

Edit: Commentary -

Matt Asay

Paula Rooney

Tim O’Reilly

Zack Urlocker

Matthew Aslett