Israel became the latest government to embrace the open-source movement in software, saying this week that it would suspend purchases of Microsoft"s productivity software and explore less costly, open-source alternatives. Though the full impact remains to be seen, open-source advocates embraced it as another sign that their movement -- which involves using publicly available code to create software -- is gaining momentum.
"It"s an extremely big announcement,"" said Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager for OpenOffice.org. "What we"ve been seeing in the last nine months is more and more national governments moving over and supporting open-source endeavors. Israel is an extremely important economy."" Suarez-Potts said his group would soon be able to release a Hebrew language version of its software as part of a broad effort to develop localized versions. OpenOffice.org is an effort sponsored by Sun Microsystems to develop open-source versions of software that would compete against Microsoft Office, the suite of productivity software from the Redmond, Wash., company.