The Copyright Amendment Act is now law. Those who opposed the original law which would allow for disconnection of Internet connections without legal oversight are no more pleased with the amendment which while introducing a copyright tribunal to hear cases of copyright infringement they will assume that a notice is positive evidence for infringement.

Red Hat has opened up shop in New Zealand saying it has done so to "further promote open source including Red Hat's Linux, middleware and cloud computing offerings." Heading up the new push into New Zealand will be Country Manager Craig Nielsen. He will be leading efforts to establish stronger links with customers, the open source community and government organisations. He will also be aiming to foster the development of innovative ideas and technologies that can be showcased to the rest of the world.

Google have made a bid for a patent portfolio owned by Nortel. From the official Google Blog they make clear their continued opposition to software patents, saying that "The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits.". Google and it's partners have been the target of numerous patent lawsuits over the last year, primarily related to Android.

The UK Government has released a strategy for reducing the costs of ICT, with Open Source playing a important role, saying "When used in conjunction with compulsory open standards, open source presents significant opportunities for the design and delivery of interoperable solutions. "

The NZOSS today announced its qualified support for the draft IPONZ guideline on the patentability of inventions containing embedded computer programs.

“There is a fog of misinformation around software patents and the IPONZ guideline,” says Don Christie, NZOSS Government Liaison Officer.

In July 2010, Commerce Minister Simon Power asked IPONZ to “develop guidelines for inventions containing embedded software.”

Due to a change in hosting arrangements, the server that hosts lists.nzoss.org.nz will be taken down at 5pm Thursday 20 January 2011 and physically transferred to a new hosting ISP.  This involves an IP address change, and will also disrupt one of the three DNS servers that serves nzoss.org.nz. The others will keep remaining nzoss.org.nz infrastructure running and there should be little or no visible impact outside of the loss of the mailing lists for a brief period.

It's expected to have the server up and running and all consequential DNS changes, etc, completed by no later than 9pm. 

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this short-notice outage.

ComputerWorld NZ is reporting that Catalyst IT has begun a new Academy program to teach ICT and programming skills to selected school children. "The Academy will enable students to get some experience working alongside seasoned practitioners and not have to depend on their own resources and those of the school" says Don Christie of Catalyst IT.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered that the Russian Government use GNU/Linux. This will occur in a transition that is planned for 2012. Russia has also approved the Open Document Format as a national standard. The new standard will come into effect in a half a year.

SilverStripe, the web based Open Source CMS has been given Microsoft Certification. Sigurd Magnusson of SilverStripe says "Microsoft's Certified for Windows programme is well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested and which work well on Microsoft Windows. Of course, much of the innovation in the software world is now happening on the web, and with awareness and adoption of open source software growing fantastically, it makes sense for Microsoft to begin certifying open source web-based software."

On Tuesday the annual New Zealand Open Source Awards were held. IRD won the award for Open Source in Government for their work with Moodle. Moodle has momentum and is in early deployment stages at several other agencies. Ponoko Ltd was the winner of the Open Source in Business category, which has used Open Source technology to enable their custom production business. The Winner of the Open Source Project was SilverStripe for it's content management system that is being used world wide. For more see http://www.nzosa.org.nz