Yes, the above title was not some sort of catastrophic typing error on my part. In addition to having to deal with the likes of Google and Apple, now Microsoft finds itself taking flak from another front: the French military.

(There are so many jokes I could make at this juncture, but I'm refraining. For at least another couple of paragraphs.)

Specifically, the French Ministry of Defense made the executive decision to switch to Mozilla Thunderbird, an open-source e-mail platform, from Microsoft Outlook. According to a Reuters article on the topic, Mozilla's open-source design allowed the army to create security extensions, something it allegedly couldn't do with Microsoft's system.

Thunderbird, along with a modified variant called Trustedbird, currently runs on about 80,000 French military computers, according to the article. Other French ministries are also apparently adopting open-source software for some of their own systems.

When queried by moi, a Microsoft spokesperson offered a curt, "We are not commenting on this topic."

The newest version of Mozilla's e-mail platform, Thunderbird 3, includes features such as filtered search and tabbed e-mail. Rated as compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and open-source platforms, Thunderbird 3 is built on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which gives it the same security enhancements and Web Standards support as the Firefox browser.

Microsoft recently lost one of its key open-source advocates when Sam Ramji, the company's senior director of Platform Strategy, officially left to become interim president of the CodePlex Foundation on Sept. 25 (although considering that CodePlex is Microsoft's open-source software project hosting repository, I'm sort of confused as to how Ramji "left Microsoft"). In a blog post at the time written by Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy, Ramji had pushed a vision of Microsoft coexisting peacefully "in a heterogeneous IT world."

Hilf also suggested that an open-source software strategy was being increasingly embraced within many of Redmond's divisions.

There have been a few recent areas of contention between Microsoft and the open-source community, however. On Dec. 9, Microsoft posted a revamped version of its free Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT), a couple of weeks after being forced to yank the program over allegations that it improperly copied open-source code. Microsoft claims that a third-party contractor assigned to the project had integrated the code, which came from a CodePlex-hosted GLPv2-licensed ImageMaster project, without properly acknowledging the source.

In a Dec. 9 statement posted on Port25 (which bills itself as a communication portal for the open-source community within Microsoft), Peter Galli--open-source community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group--did not directly acknowledge the code-lifting, but said the WUDT had now been released under GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2).

There'll be arguments on both sides as to whether Microsoft has indeed become friendlier to the open-source community. But one thing's for sure: The French government evidently wanted an e-mail system modified beyond what Microsoft will allow--and if France did it, then other governments or large corporations could conceivably follow in its footsteps. The city of Los Angeles already chose Google over Microsoft for its 30,000 municipal employees' e-mail.

My point is, Microsoft faces a potential danger here in maintaining its traditionally large market share within large enterprises and governments--particularly if those enterprises and governments start demanding specially modified capabilities. But I'm betting the executives in Redmond are already devoting a great deal of thought to that very issue--along with how big of a private army they'll need to raise in order to invade France.