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
81 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
82 Robert Fromont 15 Aug 2016 04:58
83 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd 15 Aug 2016 08:27
84 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
85 Danny Adair 2 Nov 2016 15:26
86 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
87 James Nisbet Bandit Design 8 Nov 2016 10:31
88 Brent Wood 9 Nov 2016 11:54
89 Monica Corbett Whattam 11 Nov 2016 18:06
90 Grant Paton-Simpson PSAL Open standards = competition = superior results 17 Nov 2016 19:30
91 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
92 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
93 Don Christie Catalyst IT 18 Nov 2016 13:09
94 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
95 David Nind 21 Nov 2016 22:24
96 Andrew Mason The Knowledge Group Ltd. 23 Nov 2016 09:58
97 Lachlan Wimsett 11 Dec 2016 18:17
98 Stephen Harlow 28 Feb 2017 11:22
99 Eion Robb 8 Mar 2017 21:07
100 Jonathan Garlick 22 Mar 2017 09:14
101 Nathan Brown Springload 22 Mar 2017 09:18
102 Richard McMillan 22 Mar 2017 09:38
103 Loic Teixeira 22 Mar 2017 11:03
104 Sam Bristow 17 Jan 2018 11:25
105 Mike Riversdale Access Granted NZ 26 Jan 2019 12:42
106 Adrian Cochrane OpenWork Ltd I value free market competition, and this is how you get it in the software space. 19 Mar 2019 13:11
107 Carl Geib 16 Jun 2020 13:41
108 Michel Van Eeckhout Open standards are essential in any democracy. 25 Jul 2020 06:50
109 Lovepreet Singh 7 Sep 2020 12:14
110 Rasheed A Waikato Islamic School We use Firefox and LibreOffice on all PCs in our computer lab. Our students do not miss any feature in MS Office :) 24 Apr 2021 07:29
111 Martin Hohman-Marriott United Scientists CORE Limited open standards are crucial for: - collaboration - future-proof technologies - resource conservation 7 Jan 2022 18:45
112 John Sutcliffe 8 Aug 2022 19:29
113 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
114 Christopher Dempsey 2 Nov 2022 19:59
115 Rimu Atkinson 9 Nov 2022 10:10
116 Elizabeth Doughty 17 Dec 2022 11:01
117 Adam Tansell-Murrow 5 Jan 2023 12:37
118 Elizabeth Doughty 2 Feb 2023 00:39
119 Sasha Mrkailo Digital is a major part of public infrastructure. It should be treated like that. 14 Mar 2023 09:36