Black Duck Software began in 2002 amid the heated intellectual property infringement debate between The SCO Group and IBM. Its products and services are aimed at businesses wanting to identify and control the introduction of licensed software code into their own products.

Black Duck maintains a "KnowledgeBase" of open source projects covering about 700 licences, which is reviewed by a team of attorneys to determine how it can be used with in-house or vendor software products.

Both open source and third-party code, licensed from other companies, can then be compared to the in-house source code with Black Duck's ProtexIP Web application.

Black Duck sales engineer Ronan Fagan said one customer, the machinery giant Caterpillar, has "a ton of software" and was required by its client to "vet" the software and ensure everything it developed did not impede any licensing restrictions.

"Caterpillar used ProtexIP to give it a clean bill of health and the deal went ahead," Fagan said.