Black Duck flies over open source in formation - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 28, 2008
Black Duck flies over open source in formation

I have written here and here (see "moving up the stack") about the importance of applications to the growth of the open source software (OSS) movement and the importance of services (or components if you prefer) to applications.

Black Duck combines the trends in an announcement on January 28.

The company calls it the “Black Duck Code Center” and its part of Black Duck’s line up of products that address life cycle management and application development in an era when pieces of code are “flying in” (pardon the pun) from all over under a variety of terms and conditions (Ts&Cs), including OSS Ts&Cs. Black Duck anticipates general availability by March 31.

One issue Black Duck is addressing is like but not exactly the same as the issue discussed recently on the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-discuss list and with John Roets. OSI members and Roets were discussing a trend where company management, especially legal departments, were not allowing more software into enterprises if it was licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) because of some of the license’s Ts&Cs. Black Duck says it is seeing situations where enterprises are not allowing any OSS into the shop--or are worried about its dissemination within the enterprise--for similar reasons.

Black Duck’s functionality is like but not exactly the same as the governance software HP announced the week of January 21 and the OpenLogic Discover software. Black Duck goes broader and deeper than the others based on my quick look. For example, their “search” software does not care whether it’s looking for OSS or not and the knowledge base that results can have other than OSS poured into it.

One key point however: Black Duck itself does not OSS its product at this time.