I read this news in Norwegian some days ago, and now the news have started spreading as British ITWEEK wrote about it. LinuxToday picked the news up the very same day.

Lars Tveit, director for competition and development at Bergen City Council, stated that the plans to move 12,000 desktops to OpenOffice and Linux, have been put on ice. The main reason for the postponement was that the Council wanted to instead invest in citizen-facing IT services, but he also admitted that retraining staff familiar Windows would have proved a “burden”.

“When we need to upgrade [our desktops] we’ll do a full evaluation between Linux and Microsoft,” Tviet added. “We have not said we’ll never do [desktop] Linux.”

I am a happy Linux (Ubuntu) user, but seeing all these profiled Linux migrations that cities across Europe were supposed to do getting no where, is a clear sign that Linux will not be in public offices for years to come. Munich is another great example of a city that was supposed to have completly migrated to Linux by now, latest is that they are doing their own Linux distro. Didn’t any of the distros live up to your expectations? Ok, Linux is free and open source, meaning we can all make our own distros. But is it an economic wise decission to migrate, if the cities end up creating and maintaining their own distros? Both Vienna and Munich have decided to do just so! Further is the German Pro-Linux News writing that today in between 250-280 of 20.000 computers have gotten Linux installed, and that they by then end of the year hopefully will have migrated about a 1.000 machines. Currently only users that volunteer are being migrated. These are perhaps the most advanced users and the ones that are motivated to invest time in learning something new. How fast will the migration of people that are lacking computer skills and the motivation to learn something new go? Same slow speed or perhaps even slower?

This should also be something that the Norwegian goverment should very much aware of when they later this autumn is gonna state how open source software should be used in public offices. The Norwegian goverment has stated that it wants to wean itself from dependence on large corporations like Microsoft by increasing the use of open source software within goverment agencies. Further plans are to organize a panel of experts to set standards for access to public information and how operating systems can interoperate. But as I have understood it, the goal is really that agencies should ensure that their web sites and online documents should viewable with alternative browsers,  that that documents should be stored in the Open Document Format to ensure they can be opened in multiple applications and across operating systems, and not that the public Norway should be migrating to Linux.