On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 08:06:18AM +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
The Chief Scientist has two limitations that will be hard to overcome in
that respect:
1. An over-stretched budget. It is, by far, not enough to live up to
their criteria in order to get funding
That's less of an issue than you think. Everyone is overstretched these
days, look at all the U.S. VC funds whose dollars buy 30% less than they
did in 2006. Since many of them are in the middle of projects, and have
been for the last year, where did that extra 30% come from?
It's a matter of making your case, and some people are better at it than
others.
2. A request that technologies developed stay in Israel.
2 is a problem for FOSS. While I have heard of companies that managed to
convince the CS to fund a project where some of the work went into FOSS
(and, in fact, Wine), it was as part of a larger project that was
proprietary. I have not heard of the CS funding a purely FOSS project.
You could spin it a lot of ways. The move in the schools here is toward
FOSS, and although some people get credit in the news papers, lots of
other people do it and are never noticed.
For example, someone did it in all of Jerusalem's schools, but it's
never mentioned in the press that any of them use it.
If you spin it as a move to replace Windows with Linux for schools,
you probably won't get anywhere. If you spin it as a way to cut costs
by reducing the number of Windows computers, you probably could.
BTW, isn't WINE LGPL? Can you really download the source code for CEDGA
and Crossover? I've never tried, and ask that sincerely.
And in the end does it really matter, if you increase the useage of
low end computers 10% or 20% in this country, and push them to "the poor",
they will think twice about saying no.
I still want to build my version of the cheap laptop. IMHO the OLPC is
too bloated and the ASUS EEE is too expensive. What I would like
to produce is similar to an Elonex One. BTW, are they available here?
I figure if you package it correctly with a feature set they need and
nothing more, you could get it to be a "kosher" computer, and give
them to charadi students who make up an unproportionaly part of both
the poor and politicaly powerful here. It would require better Hebrew
support than what is available.
In fact, I'm not even sure how the application should be made. The CS
requires (or, at least, used to require) that they give at most half the
funding, with the other half coming from external sources. This means
that to get 10K from the CS, you will need to raise 10K from other
sources as well. We all know that 10K is hardly enough to achieve much
on Wine, and we all also know that getting the community to put in 10K
is extremely hard. At the moment, for example, the sum total raised,
despite numerous complaints about the matter, totals in a round zero.
Once you get funding from anyone, the second source is much better. One
of the deals we lost out of was an offer for half funding from a large
Israeli VC. What you do in that case is take it, and then start "dialing
for dollars". You say "XXX is in for half, how much do you want". 10% or
so hang up on you, 85% ask for details and then say no, but those 5% fund
you.
If it's a big enough VC funding you in the first place, the time to
get the commitments for the money could be less than a day.
In this case, instead of calling VC funds, you call technology based
non profit organizations, aliyah groups and so on. There are also a few
VC's funded by rich people more as a charity than an investment. A certain
cosmetics company comes to mind. :-)
Actually, if you push hard enough, you can get as much as $250k in "old
dollars". With today's new improved shequel, that's well over $300k,
which is enough to do most of a project like that.
So, no, I don't think the CS is a very likely venue.
I do, but like every other project of its kind, what this country lacks
is not skilled technical people (or people that can learn), but skilled
CEOs. :-(
Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM
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