French Military Police Switches to Firefox

Oslo_the_CKC writes to tell us that French Magazine Linux Pratique recently published an interview with General Brachet of the Gendarmie Nationale. In the interview he discusses why they have moved over 100,000 personnel over to Firefox and Thunderbird (70,000 and 45,000 respectively). This follows on last year's switch to OpenOffice.org so it seems like the French Military Police are enjoying the success of open source.

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The whole article

[rminsk]

In an interview published by French Magazine Linux Pratique (issue #33), Général Brachet, in charge of IT for Gendarmerie Nationale explains why the French Military Police force (more than 100,000 personnel) has chosen to deploy Firefox and Thunderbird to respectively 70,000 and 45,000 seats. Here are a few excerpts:

        Linux Pratique: What are the most important features of Firefox 1.5?

        Général Brachet: These features are independent of the version number. The most important things about Firefox are its compliance with W3C standards and its availability on several platforms (Microsoft, Linux and Mac). When the Gendarmerie will deliver application on-line to homeland security organisations and, in the future, to citizens, it will not request the users to use any particular platform or piece of software from specific vendors. Using Firefox or any other Web-standards-compliant browser will be requested, independently of the platform (...)

       

Linux Pratique : How many seats are going to be deployed, and how long will it take?

       

Général Brachet : Starting January 1st, 2006, Firefox will be the browser of choice for the Gendarmerie. (...) This migration will impact every PC connected to the Intranet and the Internet, totalling 70,000 seats, before the end of the year 2006. Most of the Web services will be W3C-compliant by then. (...)

        Linux Pratique : OpenOffice.org (last year), now Firefox, when will you swich to Linux?

        Général Brachet : Thunderbird will be deployed as the only mail client on 45,000 seat in 2006. The idea is to provide every unit with a workstation and have it used daily. Every Gendarme will have four tools at his disposal: a bureautique suite, for writing documents and doing procedural work, a browser to access the Information Systems, a mail client to communicate and an antivirus. Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.(...)

It's a great pleasure to see this important project being finally revealed to the general public, and to see Gendarmerie Nationale understand the importance of Open Source Software and Web standards. It uses them, and even gives back some code the the community, while telling the world about it. If I had a wish for 2006, it would be to see large users do the same, and tell publicly that they use Open Source projects. For them, it would be a way to give back to these projects something they really need: visibility.

Re:100,000 personnel

[program21]

From Wikipedia:

The total number of military personnel is approximately 300,000. However, 100,000 of these are in the Gendarmerie, and thus a vast majority of these 100,000 are used in everyday law enforcement operation inside France and are not fit for external operations.