Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Bob Sutor’s discourse on the three types of software is interesting both for its lucid, calm explanation of the three types, and also for its guidance on the advantages of leveraging open source to build what he calls ‘hybrid’ software. That’s a term we’ve used a bit, although we use ‘multi-source’ more. The terms mean the same thing, and point to the validity of Bob’s observation that “while there is a growing amount of pure open source software (#1), there is a significantly growing amount of hybrid software (#3).”  Why? Because it makes sense to re-use software components that meet your development needs. Who wants to rewrite compilers? Why write utilities, libraries or parsers? There are hundreds of thousands of available open source building blocks, so many in fact that the act of choosing among the abundance becomes a challenge.

Bob also wisely avoids the difficult discussion of licensing issues with open source. Most developers aren’t lawyers, as he points out. Fortunately you don’t have to be – there are plenty of tools out there to uncover and easily manage the legal obligations (including Black Duck’s).  And with the abundance of open source projects to choose from, there’s a wealth of options with more permissive licenses like Apache, BSD, MIT, and others that simplify the issues around their use and integration.

When we think about open source software, we think about two things: pragmatism and abundance. It’s pragmatic to use multi-source development. It shortens time to solution, increases flexibility, saves money and lets developers do more interesting work. Abundance, a topic which Matt Asay has written about, is the secret weapon of open source: there’s lots of open source code available that meets commercial development needs.

Companies are using more of OSS all the time.  And companies are joining the OSS trend because the benefits and the resulting competitive advantages can be seen in the growing number of success stories. They aren’t so worried about the three types of software – they’re committed to getting results. Here’s to innovation through multisource (hybrid) development using open source. It’s something we can all support.