Have all our code
When the open source email client Thunderbird was
released this week there was a fair chunk of code which was developed by the
French military.
France's military chose open source software after an
internal government debate that began in 2003 and culminated in a November 6,
2007, directive requiring state agencies "Seek maximum technological and
commercial independence." The military used Mozilla's open source design to build
security extensions, while Microsoft's secret, proprietary software allowed no
tinkering.
Lieutenant-Colonel Frederic Suel of the Ministry of
Defence and one of those in charge of the project said that although it started
as a military project, it was quickly generalised it. The Gendarmerie Nationale police, which was part of the
military at the time and did the design, released some of its work to the
public under the name "TrustedBird," and co-branded it with Mozilla.
The military uses Mozilla's Thunderbird mail software and
in some cases the Trustedbird extension on 80,000 computers it is also used in
lots of other government departments. Thunderbird 3 used some of the code from TrustedBird
mostly to allow them to know for sure when messages have been read.
David Ascher, chief executive of Mozilla Messaging said
that the extension qualifies it for NATO's closed messaging system, and the
French military has shown TrustedBird to NATO. The French military is also helping build an ecosystem of
specialists around the world that provide specialised add-ons. They have done quite well. The result is compatible with
Yahoo! mail, Google Gmail and other email systems, but competes against
Microsoft Outlook.