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."

Comments

At Least...

[Nemyst]

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.

Open source software and govt's

[Andorin]

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. ;)

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[Cassius Corodes]

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.