Fear of Microsoft keeps big businesses quiet on Firefox rollouts

The Mozilla Foundation claims that Firefox has been adopted by large enterprises but companies are often choosing to keep it quiet to maintain a good relationship with Microsoft.

Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe, speaking at the Free and Open source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels on Sunday, said that he knows "a few companies" that have deployed the Firefox browser or Thunderbird mail client across 100,000 seats.

Gervase Markham, a Mozilla staff member who was also speaking at FOSDEM, added that there is a Fortune 100 company in the US that has deployed Thunderbird on 50,000 PCs and is paying the Mozilla Foundation to customise the email application.

Companies are often reluctant to publicise that they have migrated from Microsoft Internet Explorer or Outlook to the open source browser or email application, as they are concerned that this may damage their relationship with Microsoft, according to Nitot.

"I know companies that are deploying Firefox or Thunderbird, but they aren't talking about it as they don't want to see an increase in their [Microsoft] Office licence price," said Nitot.

In the past, senior Microsoft executives have tried to prevent high-profile migrations to desktop open source applications. In 2003 Steve Ballmer met the mayor of Munich to dissuade him from replacing Microsoft Windows and Office with Linux and OpenOffice, the open source operating system and productivity application. Despite Microsoft's reported intervention, Munich decided to go ahead with the migration.

Nitot said companies are keen to avoid drawing attention to themselves when migrating to open source applications on the desktop. "Guys are really shy - it's the Munich Linux thing," said Nitot. "They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry."

Although Nitot was unwilling to reveal the names of any companies that have deployed Firefox, he said the French government is seriously considering deploying the application.

"We have very good contacts at the top level with government administrations," said Nitot. "Two or three weeks ago I was invited to speak at a panel. I was the only vendor, all the others were ministers - of finance, customs and so on. It was really weird to be only vendor. They are all considering Firefox to be their main browser and we're working hard to make this happen, but I can't talk much about this today."

One of the French Ministries is already preparing to make the move to the open source browser, according to Nitot. "The Interior Ministry in France said they were working on making sure all intranet applications work on Firefox - they plan to offer a choice [of Firefox and IE] for users."

The French Government has already shown a keen interest in open source. The French Ministry of Defence is spending €7m to build its own secure version of Linux, while the French Ministry of Equipment has decided to migrate 1,500 Windows NT servers to Linux.

It is essential that Firefox makes inroads in the enterprise before Microsoft launches the next version of IE, according to Nitot. "This year we want to target the enterprise and governments market," he said, echoing statements he made at the Linux Solutions 2005 conference. "IE 7 is coming and we've got to be ready - we've got to be deeply entrenched in [the administration's of] larger towns. These people move slowly so [if they move to Firefox] they won't revert back to IE7. Today we need to make some progress."

At present Firefox has had more success in the consumer market, than the enterprise market, according to Nitot. "If you look at the graphs, Firefox usage is higher at weekends than during the week," he said. "People tend to install it at home, while in the office they still have to use IE."

To encourage businesses to use Firefox, Mozilla is due to release Firefox 1.1 as an MSI install. Other important issues for companies are the availability of commercial support and the ability to lock down the application to restrict what employees can do.

Nitot said formal support is important, but this is not something that the Mozilla Foundation will use as a source of income.

"Commercial support is definitely something we're looking into, but we won't do it ourself," said Nitot. "Many enterprises have not yet adopted open source culture. Although technical support [for open source products] is available from user groups and mailing lists, companies want a phone number. There is money to be made there."

Firefox already offers preference locking - the ability to lock down functionality but Mozilla needs to make this feature easier to use. "Companies really often ask about the preference locking thing," said Markham. "It does exist, but in terms of documentation and tools it's terrible. As the feature is already there, it shouldn't be that hard to do this."