Quebec judge confuses ‘tech upgrade’ with ‘rip and replace’

Is ripping and replacing your existing operating systems and applications worth considering as an alternative to upgrading what you already have and want to keep using? A Superior Court judge in Quebec apparently believes so, having ruled that the Quebec government should have considered alternatives such as Linux when upgrading to newer versions of Microsoft Windows and Office.

According to reports, Savoir Faire, an open source software firm in Montreal, sued the Quebec government in 2008 after the province’s procurement agency spent $686,000 ($720,000 in Canadian loonies) migrating 800 computers to Windows Vista and Office 2007. Under the law, the government is required to seriously consider alternatives on expenditures exceeding $24,000 ($25,000 Canadian), according to the ruling Superior Court judge.

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The court wasn’t swayed by a couple of the government’s reasons for dismissing alternatives to Microsoft. Among those arguments: The government said it wasn’t investing in new software, which would have required the broad search for alternatives. Rather, it was upgrading existing software. Second, the government maintained that moving users from familiar Microsoft platforms to a new one would have incurred additional training expenses.

Not surprisingly, Savoir Faire president Cyrille Beraud celebrated the ruling as a “historic judgment” that “breaks multinationals’ stranglehold on information systems.” The judge did not rule that the Quebec government had to start over, as the Microsoft software has already been installed; the government only has to pay Savoire Faire’s legal fees.

Whether or not this indeed marks a victory for Linux, it certainly sets a peculiar precedent — one that I would attribute to a level of technical ignorance on the part of the ruling judge. I certainly appreciate the need to transparently and openly comparison shop when looking to spend tax dollars, but how wide a net should you have to cast when considering alternatives?

For example, if the public works department needed to upgrade its pickup trucks, should it look at only new pickup trucks from different vehicle makers — or extend the RFP for consideration of installing a small railroad for hauling items via steam engine? Perhaps look at installing waterways and boats, à la Venice? There’s also the option of investing in horses or oxen and wagons.

Sure, those approaches might require making significant changes to the layout of your city, training or hiring people to perform new tasks, and altering your overall operations. But in the end, you have a means of transporting that — who knows? — might prove less expensive over time than the new trucks you wanted to buy.

Granted, the example is on the hyperbolic side, but here’s my point: There’s a big difference between upgrading your existing IT infrastructure versus ripping and replacing it with something different. I don’t care if you’re a Windows, Mac, or Linux shop. If you have a platform that works for you, one that all of your users are trained to operate and your IT admins are trained to manage, one that supports the other IT infrastructure you’ve built around it — moving to an entirely different platform has significant ramifications. It requires migration headaches, retraining users, retraining admins (or hiring new ones versed in the new platform), replacing other applications, and more.

In other words, entirely replacing your platform with an entirely different one might technically be an “alternative” to upgrading what you already have and want to continue using, in the same way horses and wagons might technically be an alternative to upgrading the pickup trucks you already have and want to continue using.

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