Black Duck Blog

Rob Bearden

I’m excited to be joining Black Duck’s Board of Directors and wanted to take an opportunity to introduce myself to the Black Duck community. If you’re interested in my bio you can get more information here.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some exceptional teams and companies in the open source community over the last decade or so. JBOSS paved new ground for open source in middleware with a market-leading java app server. SpringSource helped propel development efficiency with its widely adopted programming model and application infrastructure. Stepping back and looking at my career, much of my work has focused on implementing infrastructure strategies and development frameworks that help make the process better, faster and cheaper. Black Duck has already had a big impact in a similar way by enabling large scale use of open source and managing it across the development life cycle. I’m excited to be joining Black Duck in helping to broaden the use of open source even further.

Why do developer teams need help to make effective use of open source? There are at least two reasons.

First, there’s lots of open source out there, which is a benefit for sure, but it also presents a challenge. To quote my friend Matt Asay from Alfresco, the challenge with open source is “to make ‘abundance’ manageable.” With over 220,000 open source projects, this ‘abundance’ presents challenges in finding good code, assessing its fit for use, managing and tracking it over the application lifecycle, as well as ensuring standardization of components across large distributed organizations. With so much to choose from, different team members/groups/divisions are apt to pick similar but not the same component which adds to complexity.

Black Duck invests significant resources aggregating the free content available on over 220,000 open source projects, then packages that information in an enterprise scale platform to enable development teams to use the abundance of code in a more manageable, efficient, compliant and secure way.

The second reason development teams need help with open source is the complexity of code used today. In today’s development environment, the pressure to turn out innovative software applications is greater than it’s ever been. The global recession has made competition fiercer, and development teams have to do it all with the same or fewer resources. They’ve turned to open source software not just for their tooling or the O/S or their web and app server, but for “componentry” they can re-use to speed application development. Open source is just one of the many smart ‘code-sourcing’ strategies I see development teams using to compete more effectively. It’s no longer a question of whether to use open source or not; development managers are optimizing around where to focus in-house development, use of open source components, commercial code, and outsourced development. It’s a multi-source world and development teams need tools like the Black Duck Suite to make the best choices from the hundreds of thousands of open source components available while managing integration and deployment with all the other code in development.

It’s a big challenge and a big opportunity for Black Duck, developers and the industry as a whole and I’m thrilled to be right in the thick of it.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the role of open source in the new multi-source world we’re living in today, so please share your comments here on the Black Duck Blog.