Open Standards NZ Initiative

Our friends have initiated a petition to educate New Zealanders about the state of our government IT procurement, and its complete capture by proprietary interests.

We in the NZOSS do not want to see our government mandate the adoption of open source software - that would not make sense. We believe that would be a natural consequence of our government "levelling the playing field" for software procurement by mandating compliance of all software procured by government with relevant vendor-neutral, royalty-free open standards.

2014 FOSS Retrospectives

Opensource.com has an excellent retrospective article describing internationally signficant events affecting the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) world last year. It mentioned a number of fascinating developments. The most profound, in my opinion, is the UK's mandate to use open standards for communication with and information dissemination by the government there. The ripples are only just starting to hit our shores.

NZ Open Source Awards 2014

Last night a group of us gathered at Te Papa in Wellington to celebrate the NZ free and open source community. The NZ Open Source Awards celebrated the contributions of people applying open source principles to many aspects of creativity like software, hardware, making, science, and art. 

The event, as always, was brilliantly run, with MC duties provided by Hamish McEwan and the heavy organisational lifting led by Catalyst IT. Joy Liddicoat provided a stirring keynote about ways in which open source offers value to the world's least privileged and most at risk.