They say that the money they saved with this decision was worth the hassle

Oct 22, 2013 07:30 GMT  ·  By

France's Minister of the Interior is not a fan of proprietary software and he said that the Thunderbird email client had proven to be a lot more cost-effective.

Even if he doesn't say the name of the software that was replaced with Mozilla Thunderbird, Manuel Valls, the Minister of the Interior is probably talking about Microsoft Outlook.

This is more than a personal belief. The Ministry he's running has been using Thunderbird on 20,000 computers, starting from 2008. He claims that it has proven to be a solution that was 10 times less expensive than the proprietary software.

According to an official website of the European Commission, the Minister is also using free and open source operating systems for its servers and IT management.

An earlier report, also from France, said that the French Gendarmerie had also switched to open source solution, making some important money savings.