Black Duck swims in IP waters

29.06.2006

InfoWorld: How far do you think the paradigm of open source, with users paying nothing to license software, can go before it kind of acts like a generator on a car where people stop producing software if there's maybe not so much money in it?

Levin: Well I think it's going to go very far. I think that the next phase in free and open source development is an expansion in the enterprise space, where companies get together, sometimes competitors, get together on open source or free and open source projects. And they solve a problem that [is] nagging at them. The pain point may be, for example, a bunch of automobile manufacturers coming together to address a supply-chain application or a supply-chain software solution. Or a bunch of manufacturing companies working together to address a particular software problem in the hardware of a drill press that they're all using, and that the company has either gone out of business or they're not using that particular model and those companies want to continue to use that model. So there are a myriad number of applications out there that are not necessarily commercial, which are possible and necessary, which are not being addressed by vendors today. And that's where the great growth is going to be in the next couple of years.