Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Today, we announced that SAP, the world’s leading provider of business software, has selected to implement the Black Duck Suite to help developers manage the increasing use of open source software. Development teams at SAP will use the Black Duck Suite to help improve productivity by further automating the company’s open source approval processes.

Francis Ip, head of SAP Global Technology Legal Compliance, spoke on the increasing role of open source at SAP:

“With the continuously increasing importance of open source globally and SAP’s recent strategic change towards systematically utilizing benefits that come with open source, it was necessary for us to scale our open source process through further automation…. The Black Duck Suite will help us further automate and scale our open source process in order to support our open source strategy.”

We recently recorded a webinar with SAP which reviewed the benefits that open source holds for development organizations, the management challenges it presents, and approaches for addressing these challenges. In addition, SAP described how their use of open source evolved from managing open source as an exception, to making it an integral part of their multi-source development approach, to becoming the third-largest corporate code contributor to the Eclipse Foundation.

To view our 60 second webinar on “Open Source as a strategic Business Enabler: A Case Study with SAP, please click here.

To view the full length version head to www.blackducksoftware.com/60second.

To stay update with all of our latest news, follow us on twitter @black_duck_sw or find us on Facebook.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
I recently had the opportunity to hear Stephen O’Grady, industry analyst at RedMonk, talk to a group of us at Black Duck about where open source is going. Stephen started his talk with a provocative question: “Is open source over?”

One might wonder why first question is even being asked. The answer is there are few large, commercially successful OSS companies (like Red Hat). Many OSS advocates hope for more successful commercial companies to ensure its continued success and innovation. Stephen referenced a recent article called “Open Source Needs To Have An Unfair Advantage to Succeed” written by the CEO of cloud start-up Eucalyptus, Marten Mickos. In it Mickos said that “for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition.” Mickos advocates for continued experimentation with OSS business models, including “open core” as a strategy for continued innovation.

Another reason some are asking if “open source is over” is that by one metric, Google search volumes, some pretty important OSS projects appear to be declining. Stephen had data going back to 2004 showing the search volume of each of the components of the LAMP stack has declined by more than 50% (Refer to Apache Chart below).  Gadzooks, is open source over?!!

According to O’Grady, not only is open source not over, it hasn’t begun to sratch the surface of its potential. Search volume trends for the rising stars of open source– “android,” “linux cloud,”and “nosql” – have more than doubled in the last few years and are on a steady increase with no sign of slowing down. While Stephen didn’t say it explicitly, the reason for the decline in search volume of the LAMP components appears to be “maturity,” widespread awareness and adoption! People don’t need to search for “Microsoft;” they just know where to find it. And the same is becoming the case for LAMP components.

Stephen has a valuable perspective on open source directions and trends. In a recent blog posting entitled, “Frictionless Computing: What it Means for Infrastructure,” he argues that in addition to the increased availability of applications via marketplaces (Apple’s iTunes, Ubuntu’s Software Center, Android Market, etc.), the availability of code and data contribute significantly to frictionless (easier) computing. Black Duck contributes to the community and to making computing easier with our Koders.com code search website. It has over 3 billion lines of code and is used by tens of thousands of developers a day. There’s little doubt in our mind that Stephen is right: computing is getting easier, open source is not over, it’s just beginning. What do you think?

Phil Odence
Vice President of Business Development
podence@blackducksoftware.com
As I described in a previous blog, Evolving Standards for License Data, I am co-chairing a working group of the Linux Foundation developing a standard called SPDX™ (or Software Package Data Exchange™). The group has been open to essentially anyone interested, but to date we have not made the specification publically available. We are shooting for putting Version 1 “in the can” and making it publically available to coincide with LinuxCon Boston in early August.

What’s that? You can’t wait? Well, in the meantime, if you happen to be at OSCON,  please stop by the FOSSBazaar/SPDX station at the HP booth. I’ll be there and would be happy to discuss it. And, check out my whitepaper on SPDX. It provides a fairly detailed description of the scope of the specification.

Finally, if you are interested in participating, we do now have a website, http://www.spdx.org/, which is looking pretty dull today, but does tell you how you can get involved, and will soon sport a logo and house much more information about SPDX.

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
Earlier this year Black Duck Software joined Open Health Tools (OHT). This week we had the opportunity to present at the OHT board member meeting chaired by Skip McGaughey, OHT Executive Director. Peter Vescuso, EVP of Marketing and Business Development, gave an overview of Black Duck’s business and solutions to the membership and outlined the ways we can support the OHT mission and membership.

OHT is an open source community creating an ecosystem of OSS developers and health care professionals dedicated to developing a health interoperability framework, including tools and reference applications. For example the OHT forge hosts Hitex, the Health Information Text Extraction system, one of the many OSS health care projects tracked by Black Duck. Hitex, which is built on top of the GATE framework, provides analysis pipelines and modules to extract health information from clinical documents.

The Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open source projects is a comprehensive information resource on all OSS projects. Within the Knowledgebase, we track and report on the OSS projects specific to healthcare: over 900 projects, representing124 million lines of code and $8B USD of development value and 45,000 staff years (see our analysis reported in the press release referenced above). We offered to the OHT membership to provide custom analysis and information on any and all of these projects to promote their use and adoption. In addition, we encouraged the use of our free code search website www.koders.com with over 3 billion lines of available code and offered our management best practices to the OHT community for managing development with open source to maximize the value while controlling its use.

We look forward to evangelizing the opportunity for OSS to improve the healthcare industry and to support the OHT community.

For more insight into OSS and the healthcare industry, check out the webinar we recently delivered with CollabNet and Brian Behlendorf on how OSS is revolutionizing healthcare.