On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 6:03 PM, Nadav Har'El <n...@math.technion.ac.il>wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011, Steve G. wrote about "Re: FSF Campaign against > Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"": > > at least MS are not openly anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, > > or anti 'the bad Jews/Israeli'. > > Indeed. I still remember very vividly a meeting held 11 years ago in the > ISOC-IL offices, about the sad state of Hebrew support on the Web. > The conclusion was that, sadly but truely, Microsoft was the only one that > bothered fixing its browser (IE 5, at the time) to support new standards > that will help Israeli users - namely "logical order" Hebrew text > (Unicode's > bidi, see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-1.html). > > Our knight in shiny armor, Netscape, did nothing to solve the our > (Israelis') > problems, and forced us to use the ridiculous "visual order" method. > Yeah, but Netscape was far from being a knight. Royalty free browser is fine, support over more than one OS even better, but that's not free software. Uncontrolled race of un-standardized/half-baked html "extensions" - as bad as their competitor, if not worse. It only donned armor on its deathbed (by freeing the code and forming Mozilla). מודה ועוזב ירוחם Mozilla, the recently announced free spin-off from Netscape, also didn't > help. > Takes time for new FOSS project to digest a large inherited codebase (and weren't they busy with infrastructure work, such as XUL, at the time?) IBM, that volunteered to solve this problem in Netscape, proposed a patch, > but Netscape didn't even care enough about us Israelis to apply it. > It would take several more years until Isralis finally had a free browser > that > supported logical-order (bidi) Hebrew. > > So despite all its other flaws, Microsoft does indeed care about Israel and > Israelis. > > People care. Corporations seek profit for investors. Some people would argue that this is more a virtue than a flaw.
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