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Black Duck swims in IP waters

29.06.2006
Intellectual property issues have become a paramount concern in software development projects lately, with a great deal of the angst arising from the use of open source software. Forging a business model to address this problem, Black Duck Software (http://www.blackducksoftware.com/) provides a platform to identify intellectual property during the software development process. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke with Black President and CEO Douglas Levin, a former Microsoft executive, this week about Black Duck and issues pertaining to intellectual property and open source.

InfoWorld: Could you explain the services that Black Duck offers?

Levin: We are not a really a services company, we're a product company. Black Duck offers a collaboration platform that enables companies to identify their intellectual property during the software development process. It's designed to accelerate software development and enable companies to reuse more software safely and under controlled conditions. The name [of the platform] is protexIP/Development. We have two versions of it. One is for the enterprise, which is a multi-user, multi-role, and multi-site deployment, [and there is also] protexIP/Development Professional Edition, and that's for a single user at a single site. Those are on-premises solutions. So they are installed on a server at the enterprise site. Alternatively, we have an on-demand offering ... hosted and accessible through the Internet.

InfoWorld: There's also the open source angle to it. Could you elaborate on that?

Levin: There is an open source angle, but equally important, there is a binary or a proprietary software angle. Basically, software is increasingly being developed with components in oftentimes a distributed manner. So the components could be open source components, but they could also be third-party binaries. And they could be JAR [Java Archive] files that are being added to the code. If they're open source components, there oftentimes [is] a large group of them. So it could be two or three components, or there could be an open source segment that is many lines of code, or a code tree, which is a huge number of lines of code. Or it could be open source snippets, which could be two or three lines of code. And so oftentimes an entire solution may have a combination of open source plus proprietary code. Proprietary code could be from a standard software developer, like Oracle or another company, which develops proprietary software. Or proprietary code could be homegrown software developed in-house by the enterprise. And so code is now basically layers: multiple layers of in-house code plus third-party code plus open source code. And what we're able to do is differentiate all of that different code in the software in source code ... to identify intellectual property.

InfoWorld: Why do you see this as a growth area?