They have some customized parts. For example, IIRC, they use a smart card to authenticate on their workstations, and also on their web applications. For that y

They have some customized parts. For example, IIRC, they use a smart card to authenticate on their workstations, and also on their web applications. For that you need to customize a bit (better out of the box support for pkcs11 devices, integrate the Certificate Authorities needed, drivers). There are a few contributions to open source projects: A few years back, they were contributing to a fork of Thunderbird called Trustedbird for example. There are also a few individual contributors inside the Gendarmerie, for example Xavier Guimard creator and one of the current developers of LemonLdap (SSO portal). Also just as a side note, this distribution is used by the Gendarmerie, which is not exactly the national Police. In France you have both a Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie National. The Gendarmerie is military personel (the Police is civilian). I'm guessing national sovereignty plays a small role in that (VS using MS Windows, which is completely controlled by a US company, bounded to the US government).