Open Source Weblog

The good news first: according to this blog, and this translation tool Danish consultancy Ramboll Management reckons the Danish government could save $21.5m over 5 years by moving to OpenOffice and ODF, while the Danish Open Source Business Association thinks that could translate to $94m if applied to the whole public sector.

Ramboll based its claim on the assessment that a move to Microsoft Office 2007 and Office Open XML would cost 380 million krone, ($65.5m) compared to 255 million krone ($43.9m) for a move to OpenOffice and ODF.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Danish government will make the move to open source, as the city government of Bergen in Norway has found out. According to this blog about this report in Norway's Computerworld the city has abandoned plans to migrate from Windows and Unix to Linux.

Bergen previously announced in June 2004 that it was to move to SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on systems that cover 50,000 users of the city's administrative and educational systems, replacing Unix and Windows machines.

Understandably it was seen as something of a success story for Novell. It seems it was only a partial success however. Apparently Bergen has now decided that it will continue to use Windows products and will only use Linux where it is appropriate to do so. Training issues are blamed.

UPDATE
Novell's country manager for Norway, Geir Christensen, told us ComputerWorld Norway has got its facts wrong. Bergen's server consolidation project to move from a mix of Windows and HP-UX servers to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is ongoing, he maintained. "They just upgraded their maintenance and acquired further licenses."

What has been delayed, he admitted, was an evaluation of SUSE Linux on the desktop for educational users. "Based on internal priorities the IT manager has decided not to do the evaluation now because of resource problems," Christensen said.

"The customer is still looking for freedom and competition," he added. "They are not doing Linux on the desktop because there is no time to do it now."

Christensen added that this was far from a rejection of the Linux desktop in favour of Windows. "There's a huge difference between having tested the product and decided not to use it and not having the time to test it yet," he said.

SECOND UPDATE
I was somewhat surprised by Christensen's call and had not had time to check my notes from Novell's BrainShare 2004 event where Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal, Bergen's chief technology officer, discussed the project.

In fact Tuftedal told the assembled journos that that Bergen had tentatively evaluated Linux on the desktop for educational use with some success, but had delayed any potential roll-out due to problems associated with having teachers on a Windows network and students on a Linux network.

"Next year we will see if we can find a way around that and see if we can find a solution that users will accept," he said at the time, while also explaining what a difficult position the IT department was in with regards to resources. "The city spends 1% of its total expenditure on IT so everything we do it to concentrate on cutting costs and becoming more efficient," he said.

To prove his point, Tuftedal refused to talk about potential cost savings associated with a move to Linux. "I could tell you but I'd have to kill you. If we go up front saying 'we will save X million' the next day we have a cut of X million before the calculations have been done, and we are in the starting stage of this project, so in a year I can tell you without killing you," he joked.

Digg this