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 Nigel Bovey 26 Jul 2015 20:58
42 Richard Dougherty 25 Jul 2015 23:05
43 Roderick Francis David Aldridge As a user of the Linux operating system I have had problems communicating with some government electronic services. I have had to resort to mail. 23 Jul 2015 17:46
44 Richard Hector 23 Jul 2015 11:06
45 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
46 Francois Marier 22 Jul 2015 23:54
47 Reed Wade 22 Jul 2015 23:32
48 Yuri de Groot 22 Jul 2015 21:41
49 Tabitha Roder 22 Jul 2015 20:09
50 Dave Horn 22 Jul 2015 17:33
51 Terry Woods 22 Jul 2015 16:45
52 Sam Bonner 22 Jul 2015 16:45
53 Eliot Blennerhassett this is long overdue 22 Jul 2015 12:36
54 David Barnett 22 Jul 2015 12:32
55 Hilary Oliver 22 Jul 2015 11:11
56 Mike Riversdale Access Granted NZ 26 Jan 2019 12:42
57 Dave Koelmeyer Apertura Designs Limited 22 Jul 2015 16:57
58 James Nisbet Bandit Design 8 Nov 2016 10:31
59 Don Christie Catalyst IT 18 Nov 2016 13:09
60 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. 26 Jul 2016 11:47
61 Daniel Reurich Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd 22 Jul 2015 16:04
62 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 16 Nov 2015 08:57
63 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 22 Jul 2015 11:01
64 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. 3 Aug 2015 09:54
65 Dylan Reeve Dylan Reeve 22 Jul 2015 10:39
66 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd 15 Aug 2016 08:27
67 William Gordon Horizons Regional Council For the sake of Digital Continuity, open standards must become the standard for government information. 28 Jul 2015 11:40
68 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
69 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. 27 Sep 2015 12:40
70 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. 17 Nov 2016 22:40
71 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
72 Roger Wayne Willcocks L-space Design Limited 3 Aug 2016 14:55
73 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. 29 Jul 2015 14:36
74 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
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 Alexander Charles King Linuxworks Limited Open standards hold the potential to increase the productivity and accessibility of business and government. If universally adopted, we could create a step change in productivity. 22 Jul 2015 11:04
77 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. 18 Nov 2016 00:07
78 Traveler Hauptman MechAdept Limited Between the software we use with proprietary formats and those with open formats, we greatly prefer those with open formats. When working with a customer using open formats, we can often find suitable free software to work with the format. This is important for reducing operating costs with one-off projects. For open formats that we use often, we have the option of purchasing software with the set of features that suits our needs best. 22 Jul 2015 11:36
79 Guy Kloss Mega Limited 8 Sep 2015 14:49
80 Hadley Rich nice technology 23 Jul 2015 08:08