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French Military Contributes To Thunderbird 3
fredboboss sends news about Mozilla's email client Thunderbird 3, whose release we noted last week. "Thunderbird 3 contains code from the French military, which decided the open source product was more secure than Microsoft's rival Outlook. The French government is beginning to move to other open source software, including Linux instead of Windows and OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Thunderbird 3 used some of the code from TrustedBird, a generalized and co-branded version of Thunderbird with security extensions built by the French military."
I would guess that it means a lot for a country's defense administration to move over to Open Source. I've never heard of TrustedBird before this, but it seems a WHOLE lot more secure than Outlook is. I use Thunderbird personally.
At least some government agencies seem to understand that open source CAN be secure, stable and worthwhile. More power to them I say, they're quite forward-thinking on those matters it seems.
If only more could see that! With every new user, especially military organizations and government agencies, there are more bug fixes, more patches and more useful features added into the open source projects they use. That in turn makes the projects more appealing, more competitive and generally better, which closes the loop by enticing more to adopt it. We just need to get the ball rolling and, most importantly, to break old notions of open source being garage-geek-type material; I think we've seen all around us that we've evolved from that point.
Doing away with all of the potential HTML, javascript, Java, Flash etc vulnerabilities by having a forced plain text only mode would sure help with security and privacy issues.
Score one for the French. Proprietary software does not belong on the computer systems of any significant (ie, state or national) government. Access to source code is necessary in order to ensure that secrets remain secret and the software is up to any custom tasks the government might require.
;)
This is a letter written by a representative of Peru's government to a representative of Microsoft in 2002, explaining to MS exactly why the government feels that free software is necessary on their computers. Not only does it provide some insightful reasons as to why they're using FOSS, but you get a chance to laugh at the Microsoft rep's arguments.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Perhaps somewhat off-topic but I read somewhere that all this French = weak stuff started as allied propaganda to explain why the Nazis managed to beat such a powerful (and it was a world power at the time) country so easily. The thinking (according to this article or whatnot) was to keep up morale after such a disastrous outcome by essentially claiming that any other nation would have managed to fight them off but that the French are weak and gave up without a fight. Naturally the real reason was the blitzkrieg tactics combined with bypassing the majority of the French and English (they too where out in force as well) army by going thru the Ardennes (a forest region that the allies thought was not practical to pass thru). Its worth noting as well that every other European country attacked (including Russia at the start) pretty much collapsed under the blitzkrieg.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Not that I think the jokes about the French are generally either funny or anything other than counterproductive, but they don't spring from Americans being "ignorant, narrow minded, [or] bigoted." They spring from the fact that France basically has never come to terms with the reality of what happened in WWII (see "Paris se libere!"), the rabid anti-Americanism which de Gaulle exhibited, and the many ways in which France has done things which are not only to its allies' disadvantage but also to its own disadvantage- for no other reason than to try to stick it to the Americans (and sometimes the Brits). I think the Macmillan paraphrase from that article is relevant- "France, he said, had made peace with Germany, had forgiven Germany for the brutality of invasion and the humiliation of four years of occupation, but it could never - never - forgive the British and Americans for the liberation."
You can't really even make much of an attempt to joke about what happened to most of the countries Hitler invaded. But the French pride, arrogance, and rewriting of history have in the past made it easier for people to find jokes about the French to be palatable.
But the main issue was the effort to preserve the peace, the effort to acceed to the "reasonable demands" of the "champion of the poor" (that would be Adolf Hitler).
Just to show you how desperate (and mind-boggingly naive and stupid) the attempts to "make peace" with Nazi Germany were. Here's the story of the start of WWII, according to wikipedia :
On 30 August the Polish Navy sent its destroyer flotilla to Britain, executing Operation Peking. On the same day, Marshal of Poland Edward Rydz-migy announced the mobilization of Polish troops. However, he was pressured into revoking the order by the French, who apparently still hoped for a diplomatic settlement, failing to realize that the Germans were fully mobilized and concentrated at the Polish border. On 31 August 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland to start at 4:45 the next morning. Because of the prior stoppage, Poland managed to mobilize only 70% of its planned forces, and many units were still forming or moving to their designated frontline positions.
Just so you know, the exact event is that the French Foreign minister convinced the Polish ministry of defence to give a demobilization order, 1 hour and 15 minutes after Hitler's attack had started at full strength (after the switch from sabotage operations, false-flag attacks and covert operations into full-scale open warfare, Hitler had already been attacking Poland for weeks covertly, something the French knew). After the war it would be shown that the French foreign ministry was well-informed about the state of German troops, and while they didn't find out about the attack order until about 7 AM, they did not feel the need to inform Poland (again this was done "to preserve the peace", according to archives).
The French believed they could acquiesce to Hitler's demands, and thus avoid a conflict. The reasons are that they really, really did not want to fight. The reasons for that included that at that time, Hitler was the hero, both of French Nazi's and of the French lefties, including socialists and communists, and even (quite large) parts of "center" parties. With the center parties Hitler was mainly seen as a preferable alternative to communism. While the "rightist" party was not convinced, even they found the "alternative" to communism a compelling part of fascist ideology.
Those center politicians saw Hitler as someone who could bring social justice without bringing the well-known disaster that communism was. This was, however only a real argument in the center parties. He was (in 1940) not openly anti-capitalism, he just insisted on "controls" on management and ownership. He was not openly anti-religious (he even attempted to ally himself with the Pope, who refused, and allied himself with the muslim "caliph", who jumped at the chance, Aymin al Husseini of Jerusalem, who would later help him create the SS and the extermination camps, providing sites, food and troops. Yes one of the dirty secrets of WWII is that the islamic religious establishment created several extermination camps, in addition to providing logistical and even military troops to others. The muslims did this, knowing full well what the camps were for (or at least, the upper echelon knew)).
Because no-one fully realized what national socialism stood for, and what Hitler was capable of to achieve his "social justice" (that's what it was about for him). Hitler was not a good speaker, but he did realize one thing : a politician should make speaches that convey little meaning and not discuss policy or make clear statements under any circumstances, because if people don't know your ideology, it allows people who were mortal enemies (religious parties and communists, for example) to both vote for you. He pionieered the "victimhood rhetoric" that is so prevalent today, accusing any and all political opponents of "hating" the poor, muslims (yes
Really? I guess I missed the part were the French helped the Poles as per their treaty. Poland would have done better if they had know beforehand that France (and Britan) were not going to back them.
In fact, it wasn't until France was attacked 8 months later that they even started fighting.
Read up on the Phony War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War
Hell, France lasted a little over two weeks longer than Poland and it did not have the soviet union to deal with (and had eight months of knowing that Germany was on the military move.)
I am sure France has many things to be proud of, but World War II should not be one of them.
The difference is that the germans appeared all over france in full strength, that is, by both air and land and from a closer distance to "base" so to speak. The british pretty much had to deflect "just" (as if it was easy anyway) the luftwaffe to defend themselves due to tanks not being that good at swimming. Hardly a fair comparison.
Your head a splode