We're very pleased to share with you that the NZ Open Source Awards will be run again this year (2016), thanks to Catalyst IT.

If you're using or contributing towards open source software here in NZ, please nominate the projects, communities and individuals you'd like to see recognised at the awards, which will be held in October.

You're welcome to nominate yourself and your own projects - don't be shy!

Section 14.13.2 of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) states:

In reading through the patent-specific parts of the leaked TPPA IP Chapter to undertake yesterday's analysis, I noticed something the implications of which concern me greatly.

I reproduce Article QQ.A.8 below for your reference (original is on page 4 of the leaked chapter):

Article QQ.A.8: {International Agreements}

I've read Article QQ.E.1 {Patentable Subject matter} to determine if there are any clear implications for New Zealand's ban on software patents. Remember that this is not necessarily the final text of the agreement, so we are still only guessing, really.

Congratulations to our five new NZOSS councillors for the 2015-16 year!
They are

• Grant Paton-Simpson (Auckland)
• Steve Ellis (Auckland)
• Rose Lu (Wellington)
• birgit bachler (wellington)
• Danny Adair (Kawakawa, Northland)

Many thanks, too, to our returning councillors:

The 2015 NZOSS AGM will be a not be at a specific time, but rather asynchronous over the course of a week: Sun 13- Sat 19 Sept.

We are still taking nominations for candidates for council and Vice President and President - just nominate yourself or someone else (ideally with their permission). We provide instructions if you want to nominate someone or yourself.

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.

The NZOSS would like to thank Catalyst IT for many years of website support and over two years of gratis website hosting (Catalyst IT continued managing and hosting this site after it acquired Egressive, who had hosted the site for many years prior). Catalyst provides excellent hosting services, including NZ's first OpenStack cloud service.

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.