Later today the New Zealand Open Source Awards are being held in Wellington. The Awards, sponsored by Google, Red Hat, Catalyst IT and a number of other local organisations, attracted over 130 entries in the following categories:

• Open Source Ambassador
• Open Source Contributor
• Open Source Software Project
• Open Source Use in Government
• Open Source Use in Business
• Open Source Use in Education
• Open Source Use for Community Organisations
• Open Source for Creativity

Thirty-two finalists have been picked in the above categories. Congratulations to all those who have succeeded in being nominated as finalists.

The extension of daylight savings this year is being welcomed by most New Zealanders, but it’s already causing lost sleep at night for some software providers, as computers are set to automatically change the time based on the standard time changes to date.

So, what to do about it? The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs has written to key software providers about the change, although we can all imagine how slow that update is going to be!

On the DIA website you can find a link to Microsoft Resources for updating Daylight Savings changes.

This weekend a worldwide event called Software Freedom Day will be held to publicise open source and free software. Here in New Zealand, we have a handful of events being organised by local enthusiasts. So, if you want to find out more about open source and free software, then go along to one of the events.

Software Freedom Day is a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of software freedom and the virtues and availability of free and open source software. Local teams from all over the world organise events on the third Saturday in September.

Recently, there has been a move made by Microsoft to get their digital document format OpenXML accepted as a standard by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). There have been many descriptions of how this format contains components that are proprietary and can’t be implemented by anybody other than Microsoft. Acceptance as a standard means that a government may, more easily, accept and prescribe it as mandatory for any communications. This, in turn, will mean that anybody who communicates with that government must use Microsoft’s software.

So, this can mean only that: the user’s choice is more limited, innovation is stifled, and the government is left vulnerable to the vagaries of the vendors’ business decisions in the future.

Yesterday Standards NZ decided to vote ‘no’ to the OpenXML standard proposed by Microsoft in competition with the present ODF standard. Congrats for making the right decision in the face of a tirade of PR noise. Let’s hope we avoid the Swedish situation and keep some sanity.

Who knows Microsoft might actually be forced to implement the present standard!

There is a type of software that exists that you are not only allowed, but are encouraged, to copy and give to your friends. This software is not second-rate or dubious quality but, just for example, it runs most of the world wide web.

The most famous name for this software is Open Source Software also known as Free Software, FOSS, FLOSS and Libre Software. It should be noted that the the term Free Software is a reference to freedom not lack of monetary price.

The main features of Open Source Software are:

• The complete source code of the software can be accessed and modified
• It is possible to get the software without any charge

Open Source software has been significantly growing in popularity since the birth of the Internet. One of the more famous examples of Open Source Software is the Firefox Web browser. There is also a free word processor and office suite called Open Office. The Web server that serves the pages of the majority of Web sites on the Internet (Netcraft Survey) is called Apache and is Open Source Software.

Arguably one of the most significant Open Source projects is called Linux and is an operating system (like MS Windows XP and Apple OSX). This Web site is served from a system running Apache on a Linux operating system.

Here in New Zealand we have a large and active community of Linux enthusiasts and experts. We have NZLUG which is a New Zealand-wide mailing list to get help on and discussion about Linux there is also CLUG in Canterbury, and WLUG in Waikato and a quite a few other places.

There are also New Zealand companies that specialise in Open Source Software solutions, like Catalyst in Wellington and Egressive in Christchurch.