Black Duck Blog

Tim Yeaton
President and CEO
tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com

As I travel around in my role as CEO meeting with people in the industry, I’m often asked about Black Duck’s role in the open source community.  Black Duck in fact has a fairly unique role as an evangelist, as an enabler and as a contributor.

Community-based development and the compelling economics of open source software have permanently changed software development for the better – accelerating time-to-solution, reducing development costs, and allowing development organizations to focus their scarce resources on adding specific business value. Black Duck evangelizes these benefits and the widespread adoption of open source using a managed and automated process. We also spend considerable effort to document and promote the benefits and resources of open source available to developers.

To enable development organizations to use open-source at scale, we developed an automation platform (the Black Duck Suite) that facilitates the search, selection, adoption and ongoing management of open source components.  In our role of enabler, we believe we make a significant positive impact on the commercial adoption of open source by making it easy and safe to use.

Black Duck is also an active supporter of the open source community.  We contribute to a number of open source projects (e.g., PostgreSQL, Pentaho, OpenOffice, serverjs, piston).  In addition, we maintain the hugely popular free code search website, www.Koders.com that helps the open source community and developers.  It has over 2.4 billion lines of source code and is used by tens of thousands in the open source community each day.

Our role in the community and our work with development organizations gives us a unique perspective on market trends and issues surrounding commercial adoption of open source.  As commercial adoption of open source grows – and I see it accelerating — we’ll be reflecting on these trends as well as expanding our role in each of these three areas.