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 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. 29 Aug 2016 22:37
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 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. 29 Jan 2016 17:10
44 Lovepreet Singh 7 Sep 2020 12:14
45 Loic Teixeira 22 Mar 2017 11:03
46 Lachlan Wimsett 11 Dec 2016 18:17
47 Konstantin Pastbin personal 29 Jul 2015 21:10
48 Jonathan Garlick 22 Mar 2017 09:14
49 John Butt TrueNet Not just Microsoft, it would be good to get Apple to use opensource for it's office files also. 2 Aug 2016 21:13
50 Jim Cheetham 16 Nov 2015 09:03
51 Jeff Crawford Northern Network Services 22 Jul 2015 12:06
52 Jan Larres 29 Jul 2015 08:51
53 James Nisbet Bandit Design 8 Nov 2016 10:31
54 Imogen Grace 10 Aug 2015 12:21
55 Hugh Gordon Cooper Retired State Servant 24 Jul 2015 16:32
56 Hilary Oliver 22 Jul 2015 11:11
57 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! 23 Jul 2015 07:58
58 Hadley Rich nice technology 23 Jul 2015 08:08
59 Guy Kloss Mega Limited 8 Sep 2015 14:49
60 Greg Hewgill sole trader 22 Jul 2015 11:08
61 Grant Paton-Simpson PSAL Open standards = competition = superior results 17 Nov 2016 19:30
62 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! 24 Jul 2015 07:23
63 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 16 Nov 2015 08:57
64 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 22 Jul 2015 11:01
65 Gabriella Turek self 23 Jul 2015 17:48
66 Francois Marier 22 Jul 2015 23:54
67 Fran Firman 14 Jul 2016 09:49
68 Evan Fraser 3 Aug 2016 12:40
69 Eliot Blennerhassett this is long overdue 22 Jul 2015 12:36
70 Elena Kondrateva 6 Aug 2015 23:46
71 Eion Robb 8 Mar 2017 21:07
72 Eion Robb 8 Jun 2016 20:43
73 Dylan Reeve Dylan Reeve 22 Jul 2015 10:39
74 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. 15 Nov 2015 22:03
75 Donald Johnston Learn Rapidly Ltd I don't want to be forced to use proprietary software when there is excellent alternative open source software available. 22 Jul 2015 12:55
76 donald callum robertson 27 Jul 2015 09:40
77 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. 5 Nov 2016 14:33
78 Don Christie Catalyst IT 18 Nov 2016 13:09
79 Dom Tupu Sole Trader 24 Jul 2015 16:43
80 David Thompson University of Canterbury 5 Sep 2015 16:27