I promised that I would post again stating how I thought NZOSS should respond to the SSC legal guide. Instead I got caught up helping Peter actually draft the response.

I was only involved in the first few drafts before I had to turn back to real work, however Peter and many of the other NZOSS participants finished off the document. I think the final product is slightly more verbose and touches on more points that I would have raised personally, but I do think it sets the right tone overall and certainly won’t do us any harm.

This seems to have been justified by the news today the the SSC has offered to fly two representatives of the NZOSS down to Wellington on Friday to meet and discuss the document. I would have liked to have gone, but given that I’m going to be attending NZNOG for most of next week I don’t think I can really justify the time off work.

It would be good to link to the actual response itself about here, but as far as I’m aware its not up on the NZOSS website yet. There is an earlier draft at http://www.devcentre.org/ssc-response-legal-guide-oss-2006-03-08.pdf which is very close to the final in content. I think only grammar and minor formatting was changed after this point.

Now we sit back and wait to see what the SSC will do after the discussion on Friday. All in all I think this whole episode has underscored how healthy the level of open source support within the NZ government is.