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
41 Roger Wayne Willcocks L-space Design Limited
42 Michael Fincham
43 Evan Fraser
44 John Butt TrueNet Not just Microsoft, it would be good to get Apple to use opensource for it's office files also.
45 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.
46 Fran Firman
47 Chris Linwood
48 Brady Dyer Web Boutique Heard you talk at ITx2016
49 Brent Wood NIWA; NZOSS See: https://teamwork.niwa.co.nz/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=26575332 https://teamwork.niwa.co.nz/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27983920 https://teamwork.niwa.co.nz/display/NZEIIF/New+Zealand+Environmental+Information+Interoperability+Framework - https://teamwork.niwa.co.nz/display/NZBSS/BSS+implementation+work+stream?preview=%2F35848234%2F44302667%2FBSS-implementation-report-final.pdf
50 Morgan Avery
51 Alan Falloon
52 Mike Cowie
53 Eion Robb
54 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
55 Blake Burgess
56 Mark Foster Jazzed Solutions Ltd The use of open standards that are universally accepted and able to be viewed both cross-platform and cross-generation should be an obvious move for Government.
57 Shaun McGirr Need success stories to capture attention of policy makers: agency A adopted a certain open standard and look at the good it did!
58 Jim Cheetham
59 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd
60 Donald Johnston I have experienced problems in the past with my children's school requiring assignments to be submitted in Microsoft Office format which is a non-standard format. Parents should not have any need to purchase proprietary office software when there is very good free alternative software (e.g. Libre Office) which is completely standards compliant.
61 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.
62 Guy Kloss Mega Limited
63 David Thompson University of Canterbury
64 Nicholas Phillips Alternatively, as a very minimum, include cost of migrating data away from any tendered solution in the assessed cost of implementation of that solution.
65 Pikiora Wylie
66 Imogen Grace
67 Elena Kondrateva
68 David Stewart
69 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.
70 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.
71 Robin de Haan The New Zealand Government should commit to open standards and not be prepared to trade them away.
72 Abhishek Reddy
73 Tony Dale University of Canterbury
74 Konstantin Pastbin personal
75 Robert Hunt Sole trader
76 Byron Cochrane Land Information New Zealand The promotion of open standards is fundamental to my work in promoting a national Spatial Data Infrastructure. To better and more efficiently leverage resources that already exist, encourage the creation of needed data that does not, and to provide a platform that increases the value and reliability of these data and the systems supporting their access, open standards are prerequisite.
77 Jan Larres
78 William Gordon Horizons Regional Council For the sake of Digital Continuity, open standards must become the standard for government information.
79 Quentin Pidduck Technologywise Ltd The availability and community behind open source projects can mean that at the end of the day it's a wiser solution than proprietary software anyway.
80 Adrian Croucher