Black Duck Blog

Jim Berets
Vice President of Product Management
jberets@blackducksoftware.com
While this post is not about how software improves the environment, at least not directly, it is about how open source software encourages ‘green’ behavior by developers.

The catchphrase of green is Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. What better way to describe the benefits of open source software?

Reduce. In the green world, this means “consume less”: don’t run two separate errands when you can combine them into one car trip. Many organizations we speak with these days talk about their desire for simplification and “code reduction.” Their motivations range from decreased operating and maintenance costs to increased performance. Code reduction activities include examining existing applications and removing and/or creating reusable components out of duplicate code, and also eliminating unused (or lightly used) applications or software components entirely. Code reduction also includes management processes around incoming code, particularly open source – making sure that new open source software components are not introduced when others that serve the same function are already in use and suitable. The result: more efficient development organizations and applications.

Reuse. In the context of green, reuse means using the same item repeatedly: bring a cloth bag to the store instead of using disposable “paper or plastic.” Why? Less waste. Why do people find open source helpful? It’s the ability to reuse code someone else has already written, and avoid wasting resources (developers, time) re-inventing the wheel. It is also about standardizing on reusable components and versions like, for example, Apache Tomcat, Hibernate, Spring, and so on. The result: lower operating and support costs, and more shared expertise in the development team.

Recycle. Recycling is making something you have already used available for someone else to use, sometimes (but not always) in a different form. Let someone use your baby’s old crib rather than throwing it in the trash. Take a product and recast it into another form for a different use, incorporating the old material: plastic bottles are recycled into plastic decking. How is code recycled? Developers contribute code to open source projects, enabling it to be incorporated into other products or applications. OpenSSL, Expat, and zlib are contributed, and are subsequently ‘recycled’ by Android in cell phones. The result:higher function capabilities for Android with a faster time-to-market and lower development cost than starting with raw materials.

Here at Black Duck we seek to be ‘green.’ We build our applications using a common platform (reduce), use open source when it meets the business’s needs (reuse), and make improvements to projects like Apache Lucene and PostgreSQL (recycle).

Be a Green Coder. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
We just delivered a webinar with SAP, the world’s leading provider of business software with 76% of the Global 500 companies as customers. The webinar entitled “Technical Due Diligence for M&A: A Perspective from Corporate Development at SAP” covered the issues surrounding the improper use of open source software and the impact on M&A and other partnering opportunities.

Hal Hearst, Senior Director and Chief Consultant here at Black Duck, examined the types of techniques used to uncover potential issues along with the benefits of properly managing software assets to minimize delays and risks.

Russell Hartz of SAP’s Corporate Development organization was also on hand to discuss strategy and perspective and provided thought provoking insight into how SAP approaches this kind of technical due diligence.

Russell was quoted as saying:

“Here at SAP we need to know about everything that is in our code and there is always more open source code than we first anticipate.. Since 2007, Black Duck code scans have identified more than 2,000 open source components in target solutions.”

We’d be interested in your thoughts as well as any additional questions.

The recording and slide deck are available here.

Follow all of our webinars live on our twitter feed @black_duck_sw (#BDwebinar).

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
It’s great to see a series of white papers from LF and Ibrahim Haddad on license compliance.

Too often people think talking about license compliance is unnecessary or worse fear-mongering, but it’s really about taking a pragmatic approach to ensuring development with open source software is successful from the start by ensuring you do the right thing – honor the intention of the original developers by respecting their license choices. It is a multi-source world where open source is integrated with internal code, commercial and outsourced code, so license compliance is incredibly important. Nevertheless ensuring compliance is not necessarily a developer’s expertise. At Black Duck we strive to make this as simple and transparent as possible by offering tools to automate compliance so it is “designed in” from the beginning. Making it easy for developers to do the right thing about compliance allows them to focus on their primary job of building apps and simplifies the task of meeting license obligations. We look forward to these papers as a way to educate, and salute the Linux Foundation for taking the initiative to set out the basics of compliance in a thoughtful, neutral and comprehensive way.

Phil Odence
Vice President of Business Development
podence@blackducksoftware.com
There were no big product wows nor a substantial change in message from IBM, but Innovate 2010 really galvanized my understanding or Rational’s direction and the Rationale (if you will) behind it. The whole IBM smarter planet thing is far more than marketing hype for Danny Sabbah, Rational’s GM. He’s convinced that software is the future and makes a convincing case.

Last year Rational introduced their Smarter Products theme, one year after announcing their acquisition of Telelogic, a strong player in embedded systems. Two points allow one to extrapolate a trend, but a third one confirms it.  For me, this year’s expanded emphasis on products and systems (and “systems of systems” which you’ll here more of) hammered home Rational’s bet that growth lies beyond Enterprise IT organizations. More than that, I bought the pitch, and am inspired to be involved in a business that supports software innovation.

If there’s a criticism of Rational’s positioning, it’s a little diffuse with too many themes beyond smarter products, but I have to say they all ring pretty true. The world is becoming more Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent.  Danny backs that up with the statistic that we are in the midst of a 5 year boom with the number of network devices on the planet growing 10X to 1 Trillion by 2011. If three “I”s isn’t enough for you, he adds that software is the Invisible Thread that ties together systems of systems.  So, what is beyond Enterprise IT for Rational is a blending of the software it takes to run a company and the companies offerings: All businesses are becoming software businesses. It’s elemental.

The new theme this year was software econometrics, the way to manage the development process. Danny is a quant geek and I’m sure this one is his brainchild. Econometrics is a decades old school of mathematical modeling that focuses on optimizing an outcome. Danny uses that term to emphasize that business outcomes have to be the measure of effectiveness in the new world order. Development is a process in the old, factory floor TQM sense that must be optimized to deliver business results.

You can argue with their  lack of messaging around open source and multi-source development…we’re working on that—but I’m convinced that Rational has their eye on the right ball and the resources to back up the vision.

Bill McQuaide
Executive Vice President of Products and Services
bmcquaide@blackducksoftware.com
A recent post on open data from Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk and a great presentation by Zack Urlocker on software disruption have us thinking about open source, the cloud, and disruptive business models – some of our favorite topics.

A powerful force for change, disruption creates new markets, expands opportunities for incumbents, and can benefit users. Disruption also destroys. There are numerous examples of incumbent companies buying disruptive startups – not to assimilate their technology, but to kill it.

So managing disruption, and recognizing that it is coming to a town near you, is critical to running a sustainable business. Clayton Christensen (referenced in Zack’s slides) in his seminal book “The Innovators’ Dilemma” covers disruption and what incumbents can do about it in great detail. It is a must read for people interested in this topic.

There are many who think that open source is disruptive to such a degree that it’s not possible for incumbents to maintain share and innovate in markets where open source has a foothold – mobile, web, media, SaaS, cloud and software development, for example. A corollary question is who makes money from open source. Is it the disruptors like MySQL, the incumbents like Red Hat, the companies that sell OSS-related products and services like Black Duck, or the OSS projects that achieve share and velocity and become contenders, like Lucene? Who are the victims, who are the victors, and who are the beneficiaries of disruption as it plays out in open source?

Arguably Novell is a victim of disruption. Its well-documented struggle to make open source innovation (SuSE) the engine of its business while being held back by a dependence on legacy revenue streams for quarter-to-quarter results is a textbook study on the perils of being an incumbent. Matt Asay recently wrote a piece on how Novell can reinvent itself. The takeaway? Go private with the help of private equity firms, sell off the legacy bits that act as sea anchors, and use what’s left to rebuild a company focused on innovation.

In the Novell example, the disruptive power of open source was not enough to overcome the challenges of incumbency and save the company.

MySQL might be viewed as a victor. The proof is in the purchase: Oracle bought Sun/MySQL because that’s how (as Matt Asay points out) many big companies with entrenched technologies innovate: they buy innovators.

The beneficiaries? That would be the users. In mobile, for example, open source has totally disrupted the market. OSS platforms have displaced vendor operating systems, and users are the beneficiaries.

But disruption doesn’t always make things better, and it doesn’t always move things in the right direction (up and to the right, of course). Neither does open source.

Nevertheless open source can’t be ignored, because it’s gone mainstream, at least in software development. That’s the power of disruption. We’ve seen figures that indicate 85 percent of enterprises use OSS, and 45 percent of that use is in mission-critical applications – not where one would expect disruption to be an advantage.

Take a look at Zack’s slides and think of the ways in which the disruptive forces of open source can help your company make the transition from incumbent to innovator, or from upstart innovator to serious player in an established market. It’s a journey every business has to make to build a sustainable business model.