French gendarmes go open source

Firefox and Thunderbird get police thumbs-up

The French public sector has once again shown its love of open source with the news the gendarmerie - the French military police - is to switch to Firefox and Mozilla's email client Thunderbird.

In an interview with the French magazine Linux Practique, the gendarmerie's head of IT, General Brachet, said the French police will this year be using Firefox as its default browser.

Brachet revealed the switch to Firefox will cover 75,000 of the gendarmerie's more than 100,000 seats while the move to Thunderbird will encompass 45,000 users over the course of this year.

According to Brachet, the move to adopt the open source applications is to ensure independence and durability.

The switch follows the gendarmerie's adoption of OpenOffice last year, when the French force transferred all of its desktops from Microsoft software to open source. The change was expected to save the police millions of euros per year.