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."

Military?

[Anonymous Coward]

While technically military the "Gendarmerie Nationale" aren't exactly soldiers, from my understanding limited of how France works (le sange et sur l'arble?) they are cops who basically do all the shit that municipal police don't (although organized investigations are done by national police force), these guys do the running around, traffic,borders, small villages, etc.

France: going OSS like the rest of EU but better

[KlaasVaak]

The French Government really seem to get the hang of OSS every depeartment seems focused on using OSS like their entire justice department going ubuntu http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars [arstechnica.com] and unlike the Germans(+1 million failed projects) or Dutch(going Microsoft everywhere despite promises and even laws(!) to go open source) etc they actually seem to be making progress

No they nag you into upgrading.

[syousef]

They force you to upgrade?

Install Firefox 2 and see how often you get nagged to upgrade. Then there's the fact that security fixes are only released for the latest browser, extensions don't support the old version etc.

I'd love to have Firefox 1.0 co-exist with 3.0 but it'd be a pain in the neck to run with all the nagging.

Re:France: going OSS like the rest of EU but bette

[Anonymous Coward]

Being french and working with various agencies, I can give a few more information.

First, you should know that it's the military police (the gendarmerie) that switched to ubuntu, not the civilian police. The military have been using open source for years now and switching the gendarmerie is only one big step in a much bigger plan to move away from proprietary software. The justice department has not switched yet as far as I know.

On the civil departments side, there is a division (the DCSSI http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/archive/en/dcssi/index.html) that push for open source software and good practices in use by the government. All departments are ordered to follow those recommendations where it makes sense. They don't recommend to drop existing proprietary solutions unless it saves money. They do recommend new solutions to be open source though. It seems they changed their name again in the recent months though, but their mission statement remains the same: http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/site_rubrique88.html

Another impact this is having is the creation of various websites for public use. For example there is a website about computer security aimed to the general public: http://www.securite-informatique.gouv.fr/index.html

In the central government the move to open source is already well in progress. But I can't say it's the same nationwide, yet.

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow up and stop being so easily offended. It's just a funny stereotype, [janegalt.net] like Americans being loud, and British food sucking.

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[Anonymous Coward]

- Gallic Wars
- Lost. In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian. [Or at ths time in history, a Roman -ed.]

- Hundred Years War
- Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare; "France's armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman." Sainted.

- Italian Wars
- Lost. France becomes the first and only country to ever lose two wars when fighting Italians.

- Wars of Religion
- France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots

- Thirty Years War
- France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.

- War of Revolution
- Tied. Frenchmen take to wearing red flowerpots as chapeaux.

- The Dutch War
- Tied

- War of the Augsburg League/King William's War/French and Indian War
- Lost, but claimed as a tie. Three ties in a row induces deluded Frogophiles the world over to label the period as the height of French military power.

- War of the Spanish Succession
- Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved every since.

- American Revolution
- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."

- French Revolution
- Won, primarily due the fact that the opponent was also French.

- The Napoleonic Wars
- Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.

- The Franco-Prussian War
- Lost. Germany first plays the role of drunk Frat boy to France's ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.

- World War I
- Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States [Entering the war late -ed.]. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.

- World War II
- Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.

- War in Indochina
- Lost. French forces plead sickness; take to bed with the Dien Bien Flu

- Algerian Rebellion
- Lost. Loss marks the first defeat of a western army by a Non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare; "We can always beat the French." This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese and Esquimaux.

- War on Terrorism
- France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and

Re:How About a Plain Text Mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

You already can set Thunderbird to run operate only in text mode (for 2.0 at least).

ToolBar -> view -> message body as -> Plain Text

+

Tools -> Options -> composition -> General -> Send Options -> Text Format = Convert the message to plain text
(or = Send the message in both plain text and HTML)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lightning

[maird]

The development builds of Lightning are compatible with Thunderbird 3 (and don't need an add-on for Google Calendar). Install the "Lightning Nightly Updater" extension (available from the TB add-on site). After the TB restart you should have a new Help menu item that will check for Lightning development builds and install the latest if supported. After that you should have Lightning in Thunderbird. Of course, you have to be comfortable using the development builds but you don't have to update every night after you get one that works ok. The 2009-12-08 05:39 PST build is working great for me so far on Linux and Windows.

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[mctk]

I shoved my head back up my ass when I found out that the Freedom Fries people were serious.

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[Mr Stubby]

Dude, go see the world. Between the French ,the English and us Australians and to a lesser degree Americans (because they generally take jokes at their expense poorly) giving each other a ribbing all in good fun is just how we roll. It's always been the case and probably always will be. I'm never offended by a joke at Australia's expense from any of our "allies" so to speak, i often find it funnier than the joke teller. We're all comfortable that we are timeless friends with more in common than we differ and mean no harm. Apologies if a joke gets under your thin skin, but there's a bigger world out there than the box you live in. Americans neither invented, resurrected or propogated the whole "fromage eating surrender monkey" shtick, they just joined in on the joke. Granted most Americans lack a propper sense of humour past the drivel they pump out in their sitcoms these days.. so It's hard to tell the difference when they have a go, but trust me, the rest of us aren't bothered and we're all in on the joke and you're giving yourself heartburn over nothing.

Re:At Least...

[adamrut]

OpenOffice is a total mess of staggeringly bloated Java components. It's by far the most sluggish, memory-devouring application on my machine and integrates badly with my GTK theme.

I think this is a bit of an exageration. I use OpenOffice on XP at work and OSX at home and find that performance is at an acceptable level. Everything that I need to do in an office suite I can do in OpenOffice and I've found with each release it's slowly improving.

And there aren't any good ideas in OO, it's like someone bought Office 2003, made a list of features they saw, and tried to implement as many as possible throwing everything together without any kind of purpose or vision other than to take as much market share as possible away from MS office.

There are a lot of good ideas, they're just not original ideas but this is not unique to OpenOffice. It's not as polished as MS Office but I don't find it as thrown together as you're implying.

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[coder111]

Russians did. Stalin at the time of invasion by Germany probably did have more army than french did (counting men and probably equipment). Suffered the same fate, mostly due to poor leadership (good military leaders were "cleansed"). It took a harsh winter and fetching Zhukov from a gulag to stop them near Moscow.

--Coder

Re:France: going OSS like the rest of EU but bette

[DigitalContradiction]

As stated in the previous anonymous comment, the code was contributed by the gendarmerie (military police), which is quite tech savvy and has a long history of using and advocating open source solutions. They previously switched all their office software to OpenOffice.org in 2005, and are currently migrating most of their Windows workstations to Ubuntu. But this effort is not so widespread ; there are both successes (like the budget and public accounting administration recently migrating from Outlook and Notes to Thunderbird and OBM groupware) and failures, like the whole educational field, which is basically a mess. There are some isolated efforts to promote free software and open standards, but due to a lack of strong political willpower, huge lobbying from Microsoft, and general incompetence and disinterest about IT, teachers, students and administrative staff are usually stuck with proprietary (and often obsolete) solutions. There has been some recent effort to officially define open formats and standards and to enforce their use across the whole French administration (http://www.april.org/fr/rgi), but it was mostly thwarted by Microsoft using some FUD and promoting their pseudo-open OOXML format. I think we can say that more and more IT people in the French administration are aware than FOSS is a real and worthy alternative, but the battle is far from won.

Re:Watch patriotic American geeks heads explode

[icebraining]

Actually, US Dept. of Defense Creates Its Own Sourceforge [slashdot.org].

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[Anonymous Coward]

A small correction: according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_gas_in_World_War_I#1914:_Tear_gas [wikipedia.org] the French were the first to use gas in WW I, the Germans were the first to use _deadly_ gas.

Re:so where were you for the first 2 years of the

[gtall]

At the time, there was a lot of anti-another-goddamn-EuroWar sentiment in the U.S. The Japanese were seen by many as not threatening anyone with death except the poor Chinese and other Asians. The reports of Nazi atrocities were not given the moral relevance they clearly should have. One could argue that WWII woke up the Americans to not neglecting evil in the world and resulted in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (regardless of whether evil was actually there in the case of Vietnam). Mind you the antiwar crowd was and still is not weak, however the leaders in Washington appear to break on the side of kill'em now so we don't have to kill'em later...well, some of them. There is also a segment of "gee, if the U.S. gets another 9/11 while I'm in office, I'll be out of office shortly." The anti-war crowd seems convinced the world would be a bunny world if the U.S. just left it alone.

So the quick answer, if it is an answer, they are all wrong and right, but not in equal measures.

By the way, as long as we are assigning blame, Europe, sans Germany, is also responsible for WWII. Starting with not stepping on Hitler early on, to the non-Germans aiding the Nazies, to Switzerland which was just so neutral it had no balls when it would have counted.

Re:Now let the Endless French Surrender jokes begi

[Rising Ape]

Oh, I think you're pointing too much at the US here. We British have been doing anti-French jokes for a lot longer than that. Hardly something to get all excited about, and I'm sure the French have plenty of jokes of their own.