At the recent Open Source Asia/Pacific conference, I presented on the tricky subject of “How to sell Open Source Software to Government”, which can equally be read as “What logic can I use to convince my boss that using Open Source is a good idea?” This is particularly pertinent to New Zealand’s geospatial community who have much to gain from Open Source Software, as highlighted by ACIL Tasman’s recent report Spatial Information in the New Zealand economy: Realising prductivity gains. The report included numerous references to Open Source, including the recommendation that, “Early and cost-effective interventions by government are likely to be: solving the technical issues about exposing spatial data to the web in a few agencies and then replicating the solutions more widely including through the use of open source software, …” Read More
