Kathryn Ryan of Radio NZ interviewed Don Christie, president of the NZ Open Source Society and Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Microsoft NZ on Microsoft's failure to renew their multi-million dollar contract with the NZ government.  The interviews and Kathryn's questions are intense and very interesting as Don Christie defends the government's choice to break out of a reliance on Microsoft's products, and Kevin Ackhurst tries to defend Microsoft's position, touting it as a success.

Highlights for me were Kevin Ackhursts rehearsed tape-recorder responses that avoid answering Kathryn's questions, and Kathryn's obvious frustration with his failure to state things as they are.  It's clear that Microsoft wants to paint this as a success story, but is failing pretty badly.

I love Don Christie's "Microsoft software is like a virus..." which reminds me of Microsoft's "linux is a cancer" statements.

It was also interesting how Kathryn asked how companies in the new generation of open source government IT service providers will "protect their ideas and assets to generate income" (or something to that effect).  It's pretty pretty clear that Kathryn (and government agencies and probably the public at large) still really has no idea what open source is or realizes that the future of the software industry lies in services-based business models, and not product-based business models, and that since software "IP" and ideas are no longer valuable, open source businesses' assets are it's people, and it's ability to co-operate and share with it's clients, team members and competitors.  Patents, ability to bully competitors or marketing impact are no longer significant.

These latest events are further evidence that Microsoft is too monolithic and dependent on product sales to be able to adapt to this change in any reasonable time frame, if at all.

This shift from software as products to software as services in NZ's government is all the more reason to put an end to software patents in NZ.