Open Standards NZ Co-signers
The undersigned have all agreed that the New Zealand government should create a level playing field for software by mandating that all software procurement, particularly of commercial-off-the-shelf software, only considers software complying with open standards that are vendor-neutral, royalty-free and unencumbered by patents.
Where no relevant open standard exists, the government should undertake to develop suitable open standards, building on those already available elsewhere.
The goal is for software suppliers to the NZ government to compete to meet government-specified open standards rather than competing to set their own proprietary standard as is currently common practise.
| # | Name | Organisation | Comment | Submitted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 41 | Rob Pearson | IT manager of company with over 700 staff | NZ government (and District Health Boards) are behaving anti-competitively, have a strong history of being closed to open computing standards, please stop being an embarrassing laggard in this regard, here are just 2 examples and both are easily fixed: -NZ uses standards for '2' editable document file formats, 'both' controlled by the same single vendor, a better and single file format has existed for a decade now. The UK government sorted this one out https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-uk-government. -Mandating that business partners use Microsoft Internet Explorer to work within their contracts, this is outrageous in 2015. | 27 Sep 2015 12:40 |
| 42 | Mark Harris | Independent consultant | Any organisation, public or private, should be moving to open standards for information retention and reuse, for accessibility and for security. Open standards enable access to historical information (can you still read the WordPerfect documents you wrote in 1989?) as well as the documents of the future. The world is moving towards interoperability - you can't do that when you're bound to a particular vendor who doesn't play well with others and will, by default, use their own, proprietary format. It doesn't matter which vendor you are thinking of, or what type of software or data, there are open alternatives that you should be using to enable sharing or your and other organisation's information. | 31 Jul 2015 23:33 |
| 43 | William Gordon | Horizons Regional Council | For the sake of Digital Continuity, open standards must become the standard for government information. | 28 Jul 2015 11:40 |
| 44 | Michelle Beavan | Exess Connectivity Ltd | 15 Aug 2016 08:27 | |
| 45 | Dylan Reeve | Dylan Reeve | 22 Jul 2015 10:39 | |
| 46 | Daniel Strypey Bruce | Disintermedia.net.nz | RadioNZ publishes all their archived radio material in the open Ogg Vorbis format, as well as the patent-encumbered (but more common) MP3 format. People can access this publicly-funded material using any internet-capable device, running any operating system, because there is no barrier-to-entry stopping developers from creating Ogg Vorbis support. This is just one example of the benefits of public organisations supporting open standards. | 3 Aug 2015 09:54 |
| 47 | Glenn Ramsey | Componic Ltd | 16 Nov 2015 08:57 | |
| 48 | Glenn Ramsey | Componic Ltd | 22 Jul 2015 11:01 | |
| 49 | Daniel Reurich | Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd | Until we have mandatory vendor neutral open standards for government, there will always be additional impediments to interactions with the government. It's time things were rebalanced and vendors brought to heel, so that everybody can participate regardless of the technology they have access too. | 26 Jul 2016 11:47 |
| 50 | Daniel Reurich | Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd | 22 Jul 2015 16:04 | |
| 51 | Don Christie | Catalyst IT | 18 Nov 2016 13:09 | |
| 52 | James Nisbet | Bandit Design | 8 Nov 2016 10:31 | |
| 53 | Dave Koelmeyer | Apertura Designs Limited | 22 Jul 2015 16:57 | |
| 54 | Mike Riversdale | Access Granted NZ | 26 Jan 2019 12:42 | |
| 55 | Lovepreet Singh | 7 Sep 2020 12:14 | ||
| 56 | Michel Van Eeckhout | Open standards are essential in any democracy. | 25 Jul 2020 06:50 | |
| 57 | Carl Geib | 16 Jun 2020 13:41 | ||
| 58 | Sam Bristow | 17 Jan 2018 11:25 | ||
| 59 | Loic Teixeira | 22 Mar 2017 11:03 | ||
| 60 | Richard McMillan | 22 Mar 2017 09:38 | ||
| 61 | Jonathan Garlick | 22 Mar 2017 09:14 | ||
| 62 | Eion Robb | 8 Mar 2017 21:07 | ||
| 63 | Stephen Harlow | 28 Feb 2017 11:22 | ||
| 64 | Lachlan Wimsett | 11 Dec 2016 18:17 | ||
| 65 | David Nind | 21 Nov 2016 22:24 | ||
| 66 | Steven Ellis | In order for any Govt to maintain or reduce their IT costs it is critical that Open Standards are adopted or you continue to be locked into expensive proprietary approaches that carry a high end of life cost. | 21 Nov 2016 13:08 | |
| 67 | Monica Corbett Whattam | 11 Nov 2016 18:06 | ||
| 68 | Brent Wood | 9 Nov 2016 11:54 | ||
| 69 | Danny Adair | 2 Nov 2016 15:26 | ||
| 70 | Robert Fromont | 15 Aug 2016 04:58 | ||
| 71 | Richard Law | 4 Aug 2016 17:32 | ||
| 72 | Michael Fincham | 3 Aug 2016 13:47 | ||
| 73 | Evan Fraser | 3 Aug 2016 12:40 | ||
| 74 | Fran Firman | 14 Jul 2016 09:49 | ||
| 75 | Chris Linwood | 11 Jul 2016 15:18 | ||
| 76 | Morgan Avery | 23 Jun 2016 13:58 | ||
| 77 | Alan Falloon | 9 Jun 2016 16:55 | ||
| 78 | Mike Cowie | 8 Jun 2016 20:44 | ||
| 79 | Eion Robb | 8 Jun 2016 20:43 | ||
| 80 | Robert Collins | In ICT the ability to use Free/Libre/Open source is a big competitive edge, as demonstrated by many web companies revolutionising the world today. For NZ to reap those benefits, it is essential that suppliers are able to compete on a level playing field rather than being forced to work with private "standards" which are designed to advantage their owner, rather than being a commons. Case studies that come to mind: - the UK experience - The Australian tax office submission headaches - Cost if e.g. voter registration forms were microsoft office templates | 3 Mar 2016 10:35 |