But there are open source software licences that don't have copyleft provisions in them, Gill points out. The risk for organizations using open source code under a licence such as the GPL is that at some point a test case might be heard in the New Zealand courts.

'Right now, it's largely untested, and that's both part of the risk and, for some people, part of the fun; certainly for the anti-Microsoft contingent, who are big fans of open source.'

US company The SCO Group is engaged in a 'corporate war' with the open source community. SCO claims that many of the most popular variations of Linux violate its intellectual property and it has sued a number of large companies, including IBM Corp. and car maker Daimler Chrysler AG, in an effort to secure licence fees.

SCO's litigation also claims IBM 'devalued' its version of the Unix operating system by embedding SCO's intellectual property in the Linux code-base. And while the worst of the action appears to be over, there is still legal action pending.

The indignation in the open source community continues also to run high. 'How could they possibly dare to try something like that?' asks Nick Wallingford of Internet NZ, who expresses admiration for the OS software groups that immediately moved to redesign and rewrite sections of the code from scratch to remove any ambiguity about origin and IP rights.