French Defence Department rejects OpenOffice

THE FRENCH Ministry of Defence has rejected a proposed introduction of OpenOffice claiming that it is not secure enough.

Microsoft's Office product, the report says, is much more secure.

The report is the result of a one year study by the Ministry which compared the Open Sauce software with the commercial software provided by Vole.

During a demonstration, lab director Eric Filiol showed some off some malevolent code his backroom boffins had developed that revealed the weaknesses of both office suites.

Apparently OpenOffice was more susceptible to attacks made using macros. OpenOffice considered some particularly nasty macros as its friend and did not inform users when they were executed.

VoleWare annoyed the users with frequent security warnings.

Filiol said that the problem was not security holes as such, he just thinks that OpenOffice.org's rush to achieve a level of features and functionality comparable to that of Microsoft Office has led it to neglect security.

The Ministry will present its findings to the OpenOffice.org, but it could mean that the City of Paris's planned role out of OpenOffice could be delayed while the bugs are sorted out. µ

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