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
81 Rob Elshire The Elshire Group Limited In addition to the many reasons for open standards presented here, as a genomics researcher, open standards will allow us access and connect data sets over time. Proprietary standards will not. In this way, open standards promote the generation and diffusion of knowledge and drive innovation.
82 Robert Fromont
83 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd
84 Megan Williams PwC Digital I agree that Open Standards would allow NZ digital companies to compete for software development contracts. That NZ tax payers money returns value to NZ, the IT dollar is invested back in NZ which is good for innovation, growing NZ IT & digital capability, and in turn economic development.
85 Danny Adair
86 Don Johnston Learn Rapidly Ltd Because of the use of Microsoft Office in schools, parents are almost forced to purchase it to enable their children to do their homework on home computers. This would be totally unnecessary if schools were required to adopt open standards.
87 James Nisbet Bandit Design
88 Brent Wood
89 Monica Corbett Whattam
90 Grant Paton-Simpson PSAL Open standards = competition = superior results
91 Colin Jackson Jackson Strategy Government spends a truly vast amount on IT. It is the biggest purchaser of IT in New Zealand. Yet, despite IT being NZ's second largest export, most of that spend goes to overseas companies due to lock-in practices by multinationals. Come on, NZ government, this isn't hard, just solve it the way other countries do, by requiring open standards so that all IT companies can compete.
92 Olumuyiwa Taiwo Logic Expertise It's unfortunate that in 2016 governments still need to be educated on the benefits of open standards. An indirect consequence of governments mandating open standards is that the general citizenry, and small businesses in particular, will eventually start doing the same. The result will be a broadening of the base from which business are able select IT solutions and a lowering in business costs.
93 Don Christie Catalyst IT
94 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.
95 David Nind
96 Andrew Mason The Knowledge Group Ltd.
97 Lachlan Wimsett
98 Stephen Harlow
99 Eion Robb
100 Jonathan Garlick
101 Nathan Brown Springload
102 Richard McMillan
103 Loic Teixeira
104 Sam Bristow
105 Mike Riversdale Access Granted NZ
106 Adrian Cochrane OpenWork Ltd I value free market competition, and this is how you get it in the software space.
107 Carl Geib
108 Michel Van Eeckhout Open standards are essential in any democracy.
109 Lovepreet Singh
110 Rasheed A Waikato Islamic School We use Firefox and LibreOffice on all PCs in our computer lab. Our students do not miss any feature in MS Office :)
111 Martin Hohman-Marriott United Scientists CORE Limited open standards are crucial for: - collaboration - future-proof technologies - resource conservation
112 John Sutcliffe
113 Russell McNaughton Not only does this make sense economically, but surely also from a sustainability and ecological point of view. In terms of public transport it must be beneficial and more environmentally friendly to not have to throw away all the existing hardware in order to change to a new software solution.
114 Christopher Dempsey
115 Rimu Atkinson
116 Elizabeth Doughty
117 Adam Tansell-Murrow
118 Elizabeth Doughty
119 Sasha Mrkailo Digital is a major part of public infrastructure. It should be treated like that.