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 refered 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.patents4software.com/%3Fp%3D72

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.

From GETS comes "Advance Notice of Intention to Release Request for Information - Advance Notice of Intention to Release Request for Information" issued by the DIA (GETS Reference: 29927).

In previous posts we have looked at FLOSS policies of overseas governments, progress in uptake of FLOSS in Malaysia and also started a discussion about making Wellington the open source capital of New Zealand.

We recently published the Public Sector Remix review of other government's open source policy. One of the government's we looked at was Malaysia. You can follow that country's open source progress on the "Accelerated Adoption for Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software (OSS) Program" website.

"When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s technology to access government information. No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first." — Neelie Kroes, European Union Competition Commissioner