The 2010 AGM of the New Zealand Open Source Society has been held. Thanks to all those who took the time to attend.

Wednesday the 28th of July starting at 5pm.

The meeting will be conducted via an IRC channel for minutes and logging purposes. There will also be a conference line open.

The IRC channel is:

irc://chat.freenode.net #nzoss

Instructions to access the conference call are:

- Conference Dial-in Number: +1 (661) 673-8600
- Participant Access Code: 1051251#

Note that this is an International Toll call and normal toll charges will apply.

The Final Agenda is:

• Apologies
• Presidents Report
• Financial Report and Statement of Accounts
• Acceptance of Minutes of 2009 AGM
• Election of Officers and Council

The healthAlliance, which runs ICT for several northern DHBs has put out an expression of interest for an Enterprise Content Management Solution.

The relevent documentation can be found on GETS:

https://www.gets.govt.nz/Default.aspx?show=TenderDetail&TenderID=30383

In the tender documents there is the following statement:

"We are open to solutions from open source vendors, proprietary solution vendors and hosted solution providers"

OnlineGroups.Net has just released the latest version of GroupServer, an open source web-based mailing list manager. Via email, GroupServer works like traditional mailing list managers but it also has a web forum interface for reading and making posts, and list administration.

GroupServer provides the kind of web interface that users of Google Groups enjoy. Being open source, it also provides the administrative freedom that mailing list administrators expect.

Minister of Commerce Simon Power today announced that further amendment to the Patent Bill is neither necessary nor desirable, and that the insertion of an exception for software would prevail. He has also asked IPONZ to formulate draft guidelines and seek the views of interested parties regarding patents involving embedded software.

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) and .auda (the Australian Domain Name Administrator) are pleased to announce that entries in the 2010 Australia and New Zealand Internet Best Practice Awards are now open.

The Awards recognise New Zealand and Australian-based organisations, businesses, groups and individuals that have made significant contributions towards the security, openness, diversity and accessibility of the internet.

The award categories are based on the four main themes of the United Nations' Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The categories are:

Rob O'Callahan, one of "Mozilla's senior software developers, and manager of our Auckland-based development team and also our worldwide layout engine team" writes about Software Patents. He is against them.

If you don't think this statement is significant consider that fact that Mozilla has been just about the only organisation that has ever successfully broken a Microsoft monopoly. It did this through openness. The fact that Rob persuaded Mozilla to start a development team in Auckland is also pretty significant.

Here is his blog post:

The New Zealand Herald reports on Auckland University offering a $10,000 prize for the individual who has made the greatest contribution to the field of open systems in the past two years.

Linux is not storming the Desktop, despite it reaching a level of maturity at least five years ago to be used by general purpose users. However, it is starting to have an impact in the mobile phone world in the form of Android.

Most NZOSS readers will now be aware of this removed, but cached blog that referred to a meeting that NZICT had with MED. NZICT came away with the impression that MED were changing the intent of the Commerce Select Committee's recommendation, and changing the legislation in a way that would allow software to be patentable after all. The Google cache seems to have expired:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wzDfoNHqC5YJ:www.p…

This is a repeat of my announcement to the NZOSS openchat email list:

I need to make an announcement before it becomes more widely published:

I will be standing down as President at the AGM. I have had pleasure of having the role for three years and enjoyed it immensely. It is hard not to stand again.

But it is certainly time for others to take up the reins and set a new tone and possibly priorities and I know some candidates are already girding their loins. So, in light of that here are some highlights of those three years.