April 2009

STARTS
Time to rethink public sector technology
Wellington, 29 April 2009

New Zealand Open Source Society is calling for far greater use of free software in the New Zealand public sector. The renewed call comes at a time when central government agencies have been conducting line-by-line reviews of their expenditure and the UK government has released sweeping policy changes to put open source on an even footing with proprietary software.

I will comment publicly on the NZOSS site about this. I am in no way connected to GLS, Vovo or Laurence Millar and know nothing about the GLS project other than what has be placed in the public domain recently.

However, the loss of Laurence from NZ Government circles is a crying shame. He brought a lot of vision and very broad experience to his role and this will be very hard to replace. I can't think of any other government CIO that has his background.