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 | 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 |
| 42 | Danny Adair | 2 Nov 2016 15:26 | ||
| 43 | 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 |
| 44 | Michelle Beavan | Exess Connectivity Ltd | 15 Aug 2016 08:27 | |
| 45 | Robert Fromont | 15 Aug 2016 04:58 | ||
| 46 | Rob Elshire | The Elshire Group Limited | In addition to the many reasons for open standards presented here, as a genomics researcher, open standards will allow us access and connect data sets over time. Proprietary standards will not. In this way, open standards promote the generation and diffusion of knowledge and drive innovation. | 8 Aug 2016 14:33 |
| 47 | Richard Law | 4 Aug 2016 17:32 | ||
| 48 | Roger Wayne Willcocks | L-space Design Limited | 3 Aug 2016 14:55 | |
| 49 | Michael Fincham | 3 Aug 2016 13:47 | ||
| 50 | Evan Fraser | 3 Aug 2016 12:40 | ||
| 51 | 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 |
| 52 | 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 |
| 53 | Fran Firman | 14 Jul 2016 09:49 | ||
| 54 | Chris Linwood | 11 Jul 2016 15:18 | ||
| 55 | Brady Dyer | Web Boutique | Heard you talk at ITx2016 | 11 Jul 2016 14:58 |
| 56 | 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 | 27 Jun 2016 07:54 |
| 57 | Morgan Avery | 23 Jun 2016 13:58 | ||
| 58 | Alan Falloon | 9 Jun 2016 16:55 | ||
| 59 | Mike Cowie | 8 Jun 2016 20:44 | ||
| 60 | Eion Robb | 8 Jun 2016 20:43 | ||
| 61 | 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 | 3 Mar 2016 10:35 | |
| 62 | Blake Burgess | 2 Mar 2016 19:53 | ||
| 63 | 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 |
| 64 | 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! | 9 Dec 2015 09:52 | |
| 65 | Jim Cheetham | 16 Nov 2015 09:03 | ||
| 66 | Glenn Ramsey | Componic Ltd | 16 Nov 2015 08:57 | |
| 67 | 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 | |
| 68 | 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 |
| 69 | Guy Kloss | Mega Limited | 8 Sep 2015 14:49 | |
| 70 | David Thompson | University of Canterbury | 5 Sep 2015 16:27 | |
| 71 | 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. | 5 Sep 2015 11:43 | |
| 72 | Pikiora Wylie | 16 Aug 2015 21:05 | ||
| 73 | Imogen Grace | 10 Aug 2015 12:21 | ||
| 74 | Elena Kondrateva | 6 Aug 2015 23:46 | ||
| 75 | David Stewart | 5 Aug 2015 06:20 | ||
| 76 | 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 |
| 77 | 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 |
| 78 | Robin de Haan | The New Zealand Government should commit to open standards and not be prepared to trade them away. | 31 Jul 2015 21:40 | |
| 79 | Abhishek Reddy | 31 Jul 2015 18:36 | ||
| 80 | Tony Dale | University of Canterbury | 30 Jul 2015 11:16 |