ComputerWorld Norway this week reported that Bergen has put a stop to plans put in place in 2004 to migrate Windows and Unix servers to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as part of a consolidation project impacting 50,000 users of the city’s administrative and educational systems.

Novell’s country manager for Norway, Geir Christensen, maintained that the server consolidation project is ongoing, however. Nothing has changed. They just upgraded their maintenance and acquired further licenses, he told ComputerWire.

What has been delayed, Christensen 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 favor 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.

In fact, Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal, Bergen’s chief technology officer, told the audience at Novell’s BrainShare Europe conference in September 2004 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.

As if to demonstrate, 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.