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 Mike Cowie
42 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd
43 Michel Van Eeckhout Open standards are essential in any democracy.
44 Michael Fincham
45 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.
46 Martin Hohman-Marriott United Scientists CORE Limited open standards are crucial for: - collaboration - future-proof technologies - resource conservation
47 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.
48 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.
49 Lovepreet Singh
50 Loic Teixeira
51 Lachlan Wimsett
52 Konstantin Pastbin personal
53 Jonathan Garlick
54 John Sutcliffe
55 John Butt TrueNet Not just Microsoft, it would be good to get Apple to use opensource for it's office files also.
56 Jim Cheetham
57 Jeff Crawford Northern Network Services
58 Jan Larres
59 James Nisbet Bandit Design
60 Imogen Grace
61 Hugh Gordon Cooper Retired State Servant
62 Hilary Oliver
63 Harry Chapman Open standards are the way to ensure all citizens of New Zealand are able to open the files that the Government creates. We can do better!
64 Hadley Rich nice technology
65 Guy Kloss Mega Limited
66 Greg Hewgill sole trader
67 Grant Paton-Simpson PSAL Open standards = competition = superior results
68 Grant Paton-Simpson Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Requiring open standards is good for the purchasers of software such as government. It also levels the playing field so that New Zealand companies can fairly compete with international software companies. Single-word answer for why we should be following open standards? Flash!
69 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd
70 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd
71 Gabriella Turek self
72 Francois Marier
73 Fran Firman
74 Evan Fraser
75 Elizabeth Doughty
76 Elizabeth Doughty
77 Eliot Blennerhassett this is long overdue
78 Elena Kondrateva
79 Eion Robb
80 Eion Robb