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 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
42 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
43 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
44 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
45 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
46 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd 15 Aug 2016 08:27
47 Dylan Reeve Dylan Reeve 22 Jul 2015 10:39
48 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
49 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 16 Nov 2015 08:57
50 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 22 Jul 2015 11:01
51 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
52 Daniel Reurich Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd 22 Jul 2015 16:04
53 Don Christie Catalyst IT 18 Nov 2016 13:09
54 James Nisbet Bandit Design 8 Nov 2016 10:31
55 Dave Koelmeyer Apertura Designs Limited 22 Jul 2015 16:57
56 Mike Riversdale Access Granted NZ 26 Jan 2019 12:42
57 Sasha Mrkailo Digital is a major part of public infrastructure. It should be treated like that. 14 Mar 2023 09:36
58 Elizabeth Doughty 2 Feb 2023 00:39
59 Adam Tansell-Murrow 5 Jan 2023 12:37
60 Elizabeth Doughty 17 Dec 2022 11:01
61 Rimu Atkinson 9 Nov 2022 10:10
62 Christopher Dempsey 2 Nov 2022 19:59
63 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. 22 Oct 2022 01:39
64 John Sutcliffe 8 Aug 2022 19:29
65 Lovepreet Singh 7 Sep 2020 12:14
66 Michel Van Eeckhout Open standards are essential in any democracy. 25 Jul 2020 06:50
67 Carl Geib 16 Jun 2020 13:41
68 Sam Bristow 17 Jan 2018 11:25
69 Loic Teixeira 22 Mar 2017 11:03
70 Richard McMillan 22 Mar 2017 09:38
71 Jonathan Garlick 22 Mar 2017 09:14
72 Eion Robb 8 Mar 2017 21:07
73 Stephen Harlow 28 Feb 2017 11:22
74 Lachlan Wimsett 11 Dec 2016 18:17
75 David Nind 21 Nov 2016 22:24
76 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. 21 Nov 2016 13:08
77 Monica Corbett Whattam 11 Nov 2016 18:06
78 Brent Wood 9 Nov 2016 11:54
79 Danny Adair 2 Nov 2016 15:26
80 Robert Fromont 15 Aug 2016 04:58