French Army Contributes to Mozilla Thunderbird

The French Gendarmerie Nationale police contributed to the code of the last version of Mozilla Thunderbird. The French Government has been involved in the open source movement for six years, right after an internal government debate found that open source software provide more technological and commercial independence.

The France's military realized that Mozilla's openness permitted to build security extensions, in contrast with the closed source design of Microsoft Outlook which does not allow modifications.

The security extensions were released to the public under the name "TrustedBird" and were used on more 80,000 computers of several government bodies, including the ministries of Interior, Finance and Culture.

Although made by military for command-and-control organizations, some code of TrustedBird was used for Thunderbird 3. One of the main changes been implemented in TrustedBird is the possibility to know for sure when messages have been read. Reuters reported that French military has shown TrustedBird to NATO as well.

Open source also wins additional acceptance in France as the French government is beginning to move to other open source software, including Linux instead of Windows and OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.