Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Black Duck just released new data on the impressive growth of open source projects for mobile platforms. The data provides quantification for the highly reported battle between Apple and Google (see this past Sunday’s New York Times).  Our analysis shows that new open source projects for Android were 3X those of the iPhone in 2009. While to some extent this is a brawl between two Silicon Valley heavyweights, at a more macro level it’s a showdown between the OSS community and proprietary development (with Apple as the poster child).

Apple with the iPhone created a new paradigm for the mobile experience. It combined top notch UI design, touch screen technology, with the app store that leveraged their iPod experience, and combined it all with mobile 3G network capability and GPS. The result was a hit and a meteoric rise in adoption and market share. The iPhone has about 25% share of the 43 million smartphone subscribers in the US, even though it is still offered by only one operator, AT&T. Imagine what iPhone share would be if it were offered by Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint? (BTW, AT&T recently reported record 2009 results in their wireless business, much of which I’d attribute to the iPhone).

The Android platform is a breakthrough in mobile software platforms, built entirely on open source. It has received a tremendous amount of attention and attracted thousands of developers. It’s important to note that Apple’s iPhone benefitted significantly from OSS integrated with proprietary code (like many software platforms today, we’d characterize it as a “multi-source” platform). Apple ported much of its core FreeBSD-based operating system to the iPhone, uses the Safari browser which is built on OSS, plus incorporated many other OSS elements and libraries (e.g., zlib, libgcc, ncurses, etc.).

In this showdown, the question is: does the introduction of an open-source mobile platform change the mobile app landscape, and are OSS apps a leading indicator of market change? Time will tell but the near term results are promising for Android. It’s gaining market share and winning support from the OSS community (as well as commercial developers). While Android admittedly is still young, the combination of an open platform, attractive UI, and great hardware with support from multiple handset manufacturers and from multiple operators seems to bode well for its future. What do you think?

Phil Odence
Vice President of Business Development
podence@blackducksoftware.com
Black Duck has just joined CollabXchange, Collabnet’s online marketplace for their customers that offers added-value integrations and extensions to TeamForge and Subversion. Our first integrated offering on the Xchange is our new Black Duck Code Sight product that allows developers to find code quickly behind the firewall across multiple SCM systems. It comes out of the box integrated with Subversion and TeamForge.

Collabnet started the company around Subversion, but several years ago acquired Sourceforge Enterprise Edition and turned that into TeamForge, an ALM platform that goes well beyond source code management. Most of the analysts I speak with view Collabnet as a real “up and comer” in the ALM space.

We’re excited to be part of CollabXchange and believe it will be great exposure for Code Sight. The Collabnet site attracts thousands of visitors every day and we think most of them would benefit from the free Edition of Code Sight. It’s a beautiful thing.

But we are also enthusiastic about being associated with Collabnet for other reasons. First, having core open source technology with proprietary products wrapped around it, they “get it” when we talk about multi-source development. Not surprisingly, many of their ideas about modern software development techniques complement ours nicely. For example, they are big on supporting distributed teams and we find that companies doing development across multiple sites most need Black Duck. Also, Collabnet is a pioneer in offering ALM tools as a service. With all the hubbub about the Cloud these days, we expect a number of companies will find this to be the most appropriate way for them to consume development tools. We have SaaS experience with our Transact process, and Collabnet initially built their business on SaaS.

We’re also more than pleased that Collabnet invited Tim Yeaton to give a keynote about agile multi-source development at their first on-line conference “Agile ALM for Distributed Development.” (The on-line conference technology is very cool by the way).  I’m guessing you’ll hear more about Black Duck Collabnet-oration in the future.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
How does a Norwich VT farmer named Raymond and Free Code relate? Phil Odence, Vice President of Business Development here at Black Duck, connects the two concepts in his latest blog post on Network World, entitled “Free code comes with burdens, just like Raymond’s dirt.” 

Phil tells the tale about a farmer named Raymond and the issues he runs into when given a “truckload of free topsoil.” Those issues are similar to the same problems and burdens that come with free code. “Some of them may be quickly obvious, like big rocks, and others might take a little more time to find, like smaller rocks. The most insidious are the latent ones, lurking like germinating weeds…” To read the full posting click here.

Tim Yeaton
President and CEO
tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com
I’m looking forward to the OSBC 2010 in San Francisco (March 17-18) and hope to see you there!

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, will kick things off with a keynote about the growing opportunities OSS presents for businesses of all sizes – especially in lean times like now and for the near future as the economy stumbles toward recovery.

Immediately following Jim’s keynote, I’m honored to be participating in the keynote panel discussion on The Future of Open Source. Moderated by Michael Skok, General Partner at Northbridge Venture Partners, OSBC planners have assembled a terrific panel of open source leaders, including Larry Augustin (SugarCRM’s CEO and commercial OSS pioneer), Dries Buytaert (CTO and co-founder of Acquia and founder of one of the most dynamic OSS communities in the world – Drupal) and Jim Whitehurst from Red Hat as well. We’ll be engaging in a spirited discussion on open source adoption and where the industry is headed in the coming years. We’ll also be discussing results from the “2010 Future of Open Source” survey. (The survey is still open for you to add your perspective.)

Day two of the conference is also chock full of exciting speakers, panels and break out sessions, including a keynote from Facebook’s David Recordan on scaling Facebook with OSS and the keynote panel – How Open Source Drives a $1.2 Billion Market – featuring Jean Staten Healy from IBM, Director of Cross-IBM Linux Strategy & Marketing.

I’ll be leading a breakout session at 3PM on March 18th called Mixed Fuel for Innovation: Development Trends Blending Open Source with other Code – Who, What, Why and How (in the Strategies for CIO/CTO Track). I’m fortunate to have Addie Welch, VP of Legal Affairs, at Zenoss joining me in this session. We’ll be sharing some real world examples and case studies of innovative companies gaining a competitive advantage with the strategic use of open source software.

I’ll also be participating on a breakout panel hosted by Paula Hunter, the new Executive Director of the CodePlex Foundation, discussing Multi-Source development and interoperability. That session is scheduled for Wednesday March 17th at 11:40AM.

Please come by, listen in, ask questions and say hello!

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.