At one level, the open-source revolution has been won. When you use a Nokia phone, trade on eBay or do a Google search, you're using open-source technology.

Open-source pioneers such as Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, fiercely believed in the need to liberate cyberspace from the grip of proprietary vendors such as Unix and Microsoft.T

hey inspired Linus Torvalds to prove - with the invention of the Linux operating system - their basic point, that computer codes and standards that are freely used, modified and redistributed create more robust and flexible solutions than those emanating from proprietary vendors.

To me, open source has been a perfect illustration of the Green Party belief that an open, co-operative decision path makes the most ethical, economic and environmental sense.

But can open source also render New Zealand firms more profitable? Yes, provided we're talking about something more than just crude cost slashing.

True, there are short-run savings from escaping certain forms of licensing fees and mandatory upgrades. However, overseas experience indicates that the economic benefits mainly accrue from the paradigm shift involved - open source fosters a better sense of the tasks facing the firm, while offering more flexible and enduring solutions. Those savings are substantial, regardless of company size.

This year, international consulting firm Optaros reported that US companies with US$1 billion-plus revenue saved US$3.4 million on average during 2004 by using open source, medium-sized firms saved US$1.5 million, while small companies making less than US$50 million saved about US$500,000 on average.

Less cosmically, the question is: Why should a business invest in a multimillion-dollar mainframe and pay for the support agreements around several proprietary systems? Employing one team to support a Linux operating system with six or eight Intel boxes running off it could cost about $80,000 each and still provide a business with as much if not more processing power.

True, there is no free lunch. Chances are, a business may still have a support agreement for Red Hat or SUSE or for whatever brand of Linux it wishes to deploy. But the cost savings lie mainly in having one support team looking after Linux rather than paying for multiple operating systems, as well as in having applications that are completely portable and upgradeable.

This revolution is being won. By reliable estimates 15 to 20 per cent of the computing done in New Zealand enterprises utilises some form of open source, and much is being driven in-house - by work groups rather than by top management.

So what are the residual hurdles? There is the perception of legal risks. Firms do need to be aware of what can and can't be done under the end-user licence agreements for the open-source software.Even the general public licence created by Stallman - which grants any user the right to copy, modify and redistribute programs and source code from developers that have chosen to license their work under it - requires governance of the chopped up and redistributed bits of code. With experience though, those legal concerns are receding.

Inertia remains the proprietary vendor's best friend. Firms feel secure about being locked into a support deal with a proprietary vendor, and they take all the downsides that go with that captivity as the price to pay.But there are support systems out there - from IBM to the Slashdot community - and because a firm is deploying open codes and standards, the fix-it solution is usually easier and cheaper to achieve.

There's another reason to champion open source. Government is about devising enduring solutions and making them openly accessible through time. Access by the public to records of governance - and by the Government to its own administrative history - should not be at the whim of a proprietary vendor with the market power to render the tools of access extinct by boardroom decree.Here, the portability and flexibility of Linux - and the reliability of offerings such as Apache, Mozilla, MySQL, SUSE and Red Hat - provides a viable alternative. The fact the paper trail with open source is so much more transparent renders the Government legacy more sustainable.

From Australia to Germany to Israel to China, central and local governments are actively promoting the switch to open-source technology and are effectively closing the door on the Microsoft business model. In Asia, there is a reluctance to be tied to US vendor monopolies.

Can the Government do more to foster private-sector confidence in open-source processes? Already, Inland Revenue, some district health boards and education outlets are moving to embrace this technology, which should boost confidence in it. Ultimately an attitude shift is required.

Freedom can be just another word for choice, and open source delivers its benefits by maximising those choices. Sometimes this happens through allied social movements such as Creative Commons. At other times it's through giving more leeway to firms to actively configure their own solutions to the needs they define. Either way, the revolution is being won.

With Gordon Campbell

I recently attended the agricultural show in Feilding, where I met a farmer from Taranaki. “I’m a bit of a green myself” he said “but I wouldn’t vote for you lot. I’m not a lefty”.

He wasn’t claiming to be ‘a bit green’ because he had planted a tree once. His analysis of what sustainability might mean was a sophisticated one, in line with much green thinking and tempered with practical experience of living on the land. He is not the first small business owner to have told me that.

It reinforces my view that we have undermined one of our greatest strengths – our ability to cut across the outdated and one dimensional left / right continuum. We have placed ourselves to the ‘left’ of Labour and it is a dangerous strategy. We limit our voter catchment by excluding people who do not identify as left.

There are many people who are naturally sympathetic to Green principles and policies, including socially and economically progressive ones, who are not left-identified. Part of the reason is that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have become progressively less meaningful to people.

It is a false assumption to think that even the left wing votes that we do attract are ‘our votes’. We borrow them. It seems entirely possible that at the next election Labour will go into opposition and then begin to make attempts to woo back its left flank. The other possibility is that it will maintain its rightward drift and eventually an independent minded Labour constituency MP will break ranks and start a new party to fill the vacuum on the left. In either case ‘our’ left wing votes will return home.

There are Greens who come from the left. There are Green unionists, just as there are Green Maori. But the Greens are no more a left wing party than we are the Maori Party, and we make a dangerous error if we fail to recognise that. Our role is to build a specifically Green constituency, while forging strong strategic relationships with the left, with Maori and with other progressive political forces.

The additional problem with positioning ourselves to the left of Labour is that we reduce our ability to manoeuvre. From when I joined the Green Party I have been troubled by a fundamental question. Is the Green Party destined to forever be a clip-on to Labour, or is there another possibility? If we believe the former, then our strategy must be to maximise the number of our MPs while strengthening our relationship with Labour. It relies on walking a delicate balance between maintaining friendly terms while acting as critic and conscience. It offers the benefits of club membership in return for acceptable behaviour. It also resigns us to relative impotence. We can tinker around the edges of sustainability but are unable to effectively challenge the growth agenda shared by Labour and National. We are useful to the government for the passage of ‘leftwing’ legislation but are easily by-passed when they want to pass ‘rightwing’ legislation. We remain entirely predictable.

Some party members are of the view that we need to be realistic and accept that such is our destiny. It may be realistic, but it is also profoundly depressing. I personally do not have the time, energy or the inclination to commit years of my life to such a vision. An alternative view is that there is room in the New Zealand political landscape for another bloc – a third force that is able to counter the economic hegemony that underpins both Labour and National. How realistic is that? It is clear that the Green Party will not be such a force unaided.

However it is conceivable that an alliance of parties could together be powerful enough. The Greens are likely to be a major element of any such bloc. I would hope that it includes the Maori Party. Any genuinely left wing party that may arise might also be a participant.

It would, in effect, be what the Alliance might have been without Jim Anderton: an alliance of independent parties, strategically united but tactically divided. Tactically divided because independent parties may disagree, may take different stances on some issues and vote differently on them, while remaining united in a common strategic purpose. That purpose could be symbolically reaffirmed at regular intervals in a similar way that votes of confidence reaffirm the strategic alignment represented by a coalition government.

This is not a short term goal. It will not happen within the next term of parliament. Our first priority must be to carve out a strong green constituency, to represent it from a position of independence and strength, and to build relationships of trust with actual and potential allies. That means promoting green, rather than left, solutions. It means deepening our own thinking about what the green agenda actually is. It also means working with any other party where we share an interest on a specific issue. Those are the building blocks of the future.

The actual formation of any ‘third force alliance’ is a job for another day. The immediate question for us is how to develop a wider and deeper catchment of voters. I believe that the time is ripe for us to do that and that more and more people are receptive. Our message must be positive.

Of course we need to acknowledge the serious ecological and social problems we face. Anything else would be both unrealistic and counterproductive, as it is the very urgency of the need for change that leads to receptivity to our message. But acknowledging the problem is the preface to our message rather than its content. We need to convince people that there is an alternative, that it is an attractive alternative and that such an alternative is viable.

The recent launch of 'Turning down the heat' was a good example of the potential of that approach. Our message must be inspiring. Rather than trying to scare people into change, we need to excite them. We need to demonstrate a future to be approached, not with reluctance and fear, but as an exciting opportunity. We can only do that if we ourselves are inspired, if we ourselves are excited, if we ourselves are truly convinced of that possibility.

Thirdly, our message must be enabling. Too often we are seen as the regulators, the restrictors, the spoilers rather than the promoters of opportunity. We need to be about unleashing the creativity of New Zealanders to help create a better future. To promote a sense of vision, excitement and purpose requires a collective commitment to a different way of doing things. That is not to criticise our past, but simply to acknowledge that what it took to get us here is not necessarily what we need to take us further.

We have done an extraordinarily good job, and are now seen as a serious, credible and permanent political force. The next step is to look at what it would take to be seen by a greater range of people as a party worth actually voting for. We have a tendency to blame outside factors for our failure to effectively communicate our message: the media, our opponents, lack of resources and the like. Those are certainly contributing factors, but let us not underestimate our own contribution.

One problem has been a lack of coherence in our messages. In the past our diversity has been a strength. Our MPs and candidates have been campaigners with distinct areas of expertise and often quite distinct constituencies. We have practised the politics of addition and that has added up to a 5% base. However it may be that beyond a certain point the maths no longer works and that constituencies start to cancel themselves out. My sense is that we have reached that point.

The difficulty is that the politics of addition can confuse our voters. In campaigning to different constituencies we create a sea of words that threatens to drown our message. We do not tell people what the Green party stands for, we give them a multi-choice option and then let them decide for themselves, based on their biggest like or dislike. This is a problem that some of us have been talking about for a while, in caucus and in the party, and we are now beginning to take a more collective, focussed and strategic approach to how we campaign.

For example, I no longer campaign on cannabis law reform and have picked up waste, water and sustainable land management. More MPs are now making environmental issues their priority. I do not agree with those who say we need to change our charter to make the ecological principle pre-eminent. However it is fair to say that ecological issues have not always had as much representation in our campaigns as they deserve.

Part of the problem has been that while Greens understand how ecology, social justice, non-violence and good decision-making processes are all intrinsically linked, the public often does not. We have not been very good at communicating the links between what sometimes appear to be disparate campaigns. But underneath that is a deeper problem.

Our environmental campaigns are good at integrating all of our principles, and we give a lot of thought to how to embody community participation, principles of equity, and non-violence in implementing them. I am not sure that the same is always true in reverse. Take an issue like poverty. There are two approaches we can take. We can raise people’s incomes. This is the growth model, increasing consumption and waste, with a substantial ongoing cost. Another approach is to decrease living expenses. One way of doing this could be subsidising solar hot water panels and the like. This would require a capital investment, perhaps of revolving credit, will decrease energy use, yet also leave more money in the hand each week. This is a simplistic and incomplete illustration, but it gets at the point.

An activist recently commented to me that while the right has become adept at finding right wing solutions to left wing concerns (at least rhetorically), the left appears to have made much less progress in finding left wing solutions to right wing concerns. Perhaps that helps explain the tectonic shift in politics towards the right. There is a lesson for us in that. The Greens have not been good at finding our own solutions to the concerns of either the left or the right. I am strongly of the view that it is in that attempt that we will find the key to a sustainable political constituency and a base of real political power.

Nandor Tanczos, 5 April 2006