Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
We participated in the Linux Foundation’s premiere Linux technical event this week, LinuxCon 2010 which was held here in Boston (Black Duck was an event sponsor).

It was an upbeat event and well attended (approx. 600). The Linux Foundation announced their Open Compliance Program (OCP) as well as the v1.0 beta of a new OSS data exchange standard called SPDXTM. Black Duck contributed content to the compliance program – we were referenced in Jim Zemlin’s keynote presentation — and has been a major contributor to the SPDX standard.

Some people asked if the OCP announcement is good for us. We believe what’s good for OSS is good for us and this is clearly good for open source. At the highest level, it serves to build awareness for the need to manage and control open source and, yes, Black Duck will benefit by supplying tools to automate those processes. We issued our own press release.

Paula Rooney of Ziff-Davis wrote a good article on SPDX.

From an attendee’s perspective there was a lot of buzz around Android, which I attribute to its meteoric success (in Q2 it has #3 market share world wide for smartphones ahead of Apple, behind RIM). That success led to some heated discussion in one of the sessions between members of the mainstream Linux kernel community and Android/Google proponents around some of the power saver features in Android (“wakelocks”) that have not made it into the mainstream Linux kernel.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center gave a passionate presentation on “current legal issues in FOSS.” He first acknowledged that we have proven that open source and commercial companies are not inconsistent. He then focused on the next big issue, software patents, which he is against (we believe the system can be improved), and how he believes the concept impedes innovation. Whether you agree with Eben’s views or not, you can’t argue that he is an exceptional speaker. He received a standing ovation, not something I’ve seen at a Linux event before!

Forrester’s Jeff Hammond delivered a keynote presentation on open source software in Enterprise IT. Jeff’s overall message was that in Enterprise IT open source has “Crossed the Chasm” and is now widely adopted and receiving management support. Jeff reviewed a number of case studies (a number from companies that use Black Duck), including a financial service company that demonstrated per project software costs savings from OSS that range from 30% to 80%. He also featured Sabre, a travel reservation service provider that has saved millions of dollars using OSS.

Sabre’s software acquisition policy reflects the enthusiasm I sensed at the show: “OSS first, buy next, build last.”

Were you there, what were your impressions?

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
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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Timothy Kenny
Director of Marketing
Tkenny@blackducksoftware.com
We just delivered a webinar which covered the basics of open source, including open source definitions, and the different types of licenses.

Open Source Software legal experts, Karen Copenhaver and Mark Radcliffe, were both on hand to talk about the associated risks in using open source software. Mark and Karen pointed out that although there are risks associated with using open source, when managed and used correctly, the benefits will outweigh the risk.

Open source software has significant benefits and is free, but it is not free of obligations. Gartner Research recently found that while virtually all mainstream IT organizations leverage open source in one capacity or another, fewer than 30% currently have an OSS governance policy in place. With over 1,900 different licenses available today, each with their own obligations, it can be difficult to properly manage the use of open source.

Karen Copenhaver gave a comprehensive review of the legal framework including intellectual property and licensing. Karen answered questions such as:

• Who owns a copyright?

• What is a patent?

• What is a license and what is a sublicense?

• What is the same between commercial and open source licenses?

• What is different about an open source license?

Mark Radcliffe gave a great overview of the history of the open source movement. Mark pointed out that it was in the year of 1998 where the term “open source” was coined.

Mark also covered the various types of open source licenses which include:

• Restrictive: Requires licensor to make improvements or enhancements available under similar terms. The GPL would be an example of this kind.

• Permissive: Modifications/enhancements may remain proprietary. An example of this would be Apache.

• Single user license: Apple, Lucent

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

Follow us on twitter @black_duck_sw and find us on Facebook.

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).