On Oct 25, 2011, at 11:23 AM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
another company can decide that it can't be bothered with this
small market (this is the way Apple went for many years, and many of
its
services still are unavailable in Israel),
That's simply untrue. Apple for whatever reason it chose, sold an
exclusive franchise to a company called YEDA about 27 years ago. When
it expired, they chose to sell another one to a new company iDigital,
which happens to be part owned by the President's son.
They do that in many countries because of tax and other considerations.
What products are sold in Israel or not is up to iDigital. They have
to commit to a certain level of sales and support before Apple will
consider letting them sell products. This requires an investment in
sending technicians overseas to learn how to maintain products,
training sales and support people, producing sales and user
literature, etc.
Some products are not sold here because they are phased in, for
example the iPhone 4s, but that's common around the world.
For example, someone I know went to Office Depot the first day they
were selling legally imported iPads and a person from iDigital was
there answering questions and doing demos. The iPad came out of the
box with Hebrew support.
I don't know anything about Apple II's, etc, but when I purchased my
first MAC in 1990 (I was using them at work before that), it was in
the US. It did not come with Hebrew support, but you could download
for free (or get it from a user group if they had it) a Hebrew
localized version of MacOS. I assume it was available here for free.
BTW, despite what many people say, Steve Jobs was very supportive of
open source. The actual MacOS is open source (though with a different
license). The GUI and the apps are not, but that is a different issue.
Every version of MacOS X based upon UNIX is. It also comes with a
suite of developer tools including gcc (now an optional download or a
free app from the app store) and X windows, so you could in theory,
boot the OS, go into X windows and live there running open source
programs, without ever running a closed source program from Apple,
once you started X.
In fact I have a particularly pesky Windows program I need to run on
my MAC, and I run it by having compiled an open source version of X
Windows and WINE and run it by starting a BASH script. Both X and WINE
were compiled from source. There are versions available in binary, but
I needed to build them in sync to get the app to work.
Back in the old days (before OSX and the G3 processor), Apple did in
fact implement Linux on Macs, and it was GPL'ed. In the end they
decided to not persue it, because they are as you say in the business
of making money, and the GPL was not compatible with that goal in
their opinion.
Instead they used BSD with its "artistic license", but it's still open
source.
BTW, as for boycotts, the only easily recognized Israeli product in
the MACs in the 1990's was a Tadiran battery and someone sued Apple
in the UK for "supporting the genocide of the Palestinians" by using
them.
Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(
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