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
1 Jeremy List
2 Jeffrey John Martin
3 Sasha Mrkailo Digital is a major part of public infrastructure. It should be treated like that.
4 Elizabeth Doughty
5 Adam Tansell-Murrow
6 Elizabeth Doughty
7 Rimu Atkinson
8 Christopher Dempsey
9 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.
10 John Sutcliffe
11 Martin Hohman-Marriott United Scientists CORE Limited open standards are crucial for: - collaboration - future-proof technologies - resource conservation
12 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 :)
13 Lovepreet Singh
14 Michel Van Eeckhout Open standards are essential in any democracy.
15 Carl Geib
16 Adrian Cochrane OpenWork Ltd I value free market competition, and this is how you get it in the software space.
17 Mike Riversdale Access Granted NZ
18 Sam Bristow
19 Loic Teixeira
20 Richard McMillan
21 Nathan Brown Springload
22 Jonathan Garlick
23 Eion Robb
24 Stephen Harlow
25 Lachlan Wimsett
26 Andrew Mason The Knowledge Group Ltd.
27 David Nind
28 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.
29 Don Christie Catalyst IT
30 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.
31 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.
32 Grant Paton-Simpson PSAL Open standards = competition = superior results
33 Monica Corbett Whattam
34 Brent Wood
35 James Nisbet Bandit Design
36 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.
37 Danny Adair
38 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.
39 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd
40 Robert Fromont