Black Duck Blog

Phil Odence
Vice President of Business Development
podence@blackducksoftware.com
As I described in a previous blog, Evolving Standards for License Data, I am co-chairing a working group of the Linux Foundation developing a standard called SPDX™ (or Software Package Data Exchange™). The group has been open to essentially anyone interested, but to date we have not made the specification publically available. We are shooting for putting Version 1 “in the can” and making it publically available to coincide with LinuxCon Boston in early August.

What’s that? You can’t wait? Well, in the meantime, if you happen to be at OSCON,  please stop by the FOSSBazaar/SPDX station at the HP booth. I’ll be there and would be happy to discuss it. And, check out my whitepaper on SPDX. It provides a fairly detailed description of the scope of the specification.

Finally, if you are interested in participating, we do now have a website, http://www.spdx.org/, which is looking pretty dull today, but does tell you how you can get involved, and will soon sport a logo and house much more information about SPDX.

Courtney Spencer
cspencer@blackducksoftware.com
Our partner, the Olliance Group (www.OllianceGroup.com), is hosting an educational webinar on Enterprise open source software procurement and support best practices.

Since open source software licensing and distribution models are markedly different than those used with proprietary software, significant challenges are presented to traditional supply chain or procurement organizations. The resolution is then finding high-quality open source solutions and systems integrators to implement them.

In this webinar, IT Executives, Colin Bodell of Amazon, Tim Golden of Bank of America and Yuvi Kochar of the Washington Post Company, will talk about the open source software acquisition and support challenges they have faced and share solutions they have developed to overcome these challenges.

Webinar: Enterprise Open Source Software Procurement and Support Best Practices

Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2010

Time: July 15^th at 11:00am Pacific/2pm Eastern

Moderator: Greg Olson, Senior Partner, Olliance Group

Speakers:

• Colin Bodell, VP Web Platforms, Amazon

• Tim Golden, SVP Product Management, Bank of America

• Yuvi Kochar, CIO, The Washington Post Company

Cost: No charge

Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/133800513

Courtney Spencer
cspencer@blackducksoftware.com
Earlier this year Black Duck Software joined Open Health Tools (OHT). This week we had the opportunity to present at the OHT board member meeting chaired by Skip McGaughey, OHT Executive Director. Peter Vescuso, EVP of Marketing and Business Development, gave an overview of Black Duck’s business and solutions to the membership and outlined the ways we can support the OHT mission and membership.

OHT is an open source community creating an ecosystem of OSS developers and health care professionals dedicated to developing a health interoperability framework, including tools and reference applications. For example the OHT forge hosts Hitex, the Health Information Text Extraction system, one of the many OSS health care projects tracked by Black Duck. Hitex, which is built on top of the GATE framework, provides analysis pipelines and modules to extract health information from clinical documents.

The Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open source projects is a comprehensive information resource on all OSS projects. Within the Knowledgebase, we track and report on the OSS projects specific to healthcare: over 900 projects, representing124 million lines of code and $8B USD of development value and 45,000 staff years (see our analysis reported in the press release referenced above). We offered to the OHT membership to provide custom analysis and information on any and all of these projects to promote their use and adoption. In addition, we encouraged the use of our free code search website www.koders.com with over 3 billion lines of available code and offered our management best practices to the OHT community for managing development with open source to maximize the value while controlling its use.

We look forward to evangelizing the opportunity for OSS to improve the healthcare industry and to support the OHT community.

For more insight into OSS and the healthcare industry, check out the webinar we recently delivered with CollabNet and Brian Behlendorf on how OSS is revolutionizing healthcare.

Courtney Spencer
cspencer@blackducksoftware.com
Yesterday we delivered a webinar in collaboration with Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet, and Brian Behlendorf, open source pioneer, CollabNet co-founder/Board member and independent consultant to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The webinar entitled “Open Source and Open Collaboration: How the U.S. Government is Reinventing the Healthcare IT Industry” described the extensive work going on with open source and open collaboration to create standards and useable code to enable the digitization and trusted transmission of medical data over the Internet.

Tim Yeaton, our CEO here at Black Duck, and Bill Portelli provided an excellent overview of how application development generally is becoming agile, distributed and ‘multi-source’ with open source.

Bill gave a great review of agile in the cloud. He pointed out that “1/3-1/2 of development organizations are using agile methods today.”

Brian Behlendorf spoke on open source and open collaboration in the health care IT industry today. Given his entrepreneurial experience as a founder of the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, I don’t know if there’s a better guy to help drive this important imitative forward. He works directly with HHS to advance the state of health data exchange through initiatives designed to create open standards and open source software.

Brian was quoted as saying “Steps in advancing the national health IT agenda include stimulating technical progress.” He spent time explaining the initiatives and framework of CONNECT, the open source software solution that allows the secure exchange of health information. CONNECT leverages standards but is real software and you’d expect nothing less when Brian is involved. CONNECT’s community portal can be found at connectopensource.org.

Brian summarized the health data exchange initiatives by saying, “Health exchange will be a commodity, but data is the value.”

We had a number of important questions regarding this information packed webinar. We’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on these issues.

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