Don Christie elected President of NZOSS

The New Zealand Open Source Society has chosen Catalyst Director Don Christie as its new President. “The NZOSS took its first steps into a larger world today, with Don taking the reins of President. I am confident Don will be able to take us forward into new opportunities and challenges.” said retiring President and Society founder Peter Harrison.

Harrison intends to remain active within the Society and is looking forward to being out of the limelight for a while, having held the post for the last five years.

“Peter has been - and will continue to be - an outstanding advocate for open source.” according to Christie. “It is easy to forget that all of what he and other members do to promote open source is an entirely voluntary effort without which many of the big issues we face might go unnoticed.”

Open source software is being increasing used in many areas of business, education, government and community organisations within New Zealand and overseas. “The Society has an important role in protecting the kind of environment in which open source thrives” said Christie. “We will continue to speak out on patent and copyright issues, for example, which threaten to stifle the innovation and collaboration open technologies offer. New Zealand has much to gain from the open source movement. We have seen sector-wide collaboration around e-learning in New Zealand tertiary education using open source software. We have emerging companies reaching a global market by open sourcing powerful software developed here in New Zealand. We have New Zealanders making major contributions to leading open source projects like the Firefox browser and Ruby on Rails.”

The Society is helping to bring together some of the outstanding work already being done here to build, and build with, open source software by backing this year’s New Zealand Open Source Awards.