Black Duck Buys Koders

Black Duck Software is buying Koders, which provides an online search engine for open-source software.

Black Duck announced its acquisition of Koders April 28. More than 30,000 developers come to Koders.com each day to search more than 766 million lines of code written in more than 30 languages and identified with 28 software licenses. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Koders.com is a Web site where software developers can find reusable open-source code, methods, examples, algorithms and solutions. Reusing open-source software frees developers from spending time "reinventing the wheel" enabling them to complete projects faster, said Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck.

This will be Black Duck’s first acquisition. Included in the deal are Koders’ enterprise product and three employees, Levin said.  He said Koders competes with Krugle as well as Google Code Search.

Moreover, Levin said Black Duck will improve Koders' free online search site and incorporate Koders' search capability into Black Duck's open-source product portfolio. With the acquisition, Black Duck's offerings will save software development teams time and money by accelerating their ability to find, reuse and manage open-source software, the company said.

Black Duck will enhance the Koders search database with code and metadata from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, a database of open-source- and third-party code that contains more than 520 million code files, representing many billions of lines of code.

With the Koders acquisition, Black Duck now offers an array of capabilities for incorporating open-source software into application development. With Koders, Black Duck gains a search engine that can search for specific code functions or solutions in repositories across the Internet. Moreover, for component search, Black Duck Code Center enables development teams to search a KnowledgeBase containing hundreds of thousands of open-source components. Developers can internally publish a catalog of approved open-source components to facilitate reuse within their own organizations. Black Duck released Black Duck Code Center in the first quarter.

Meanwhile, for fragment and file search, Black Duck protexIPT automates the review of code and finds unapproved code fragments, files or entire components that were integrated into a code base without adhering to a company's open-source review policies. This capability can be used to uncover licensing violations, security issues, unsupported open source and outdated code.

Levin said Koders has always been more refined in its ability to pick up fragments, strings and meta information than Krugle or Google Code Search.

"We're going to be able to add that to Black Duck products like Code Center," he said. "Code Center will now be augmented with the Koders capability."

Meanwhile, Levin hinted that Black Duck's acquisition of Koders may only be the beginning of a possible series of acquisitions of companies and technologies.

"By adding Koders and other products we might acquire, we can offer our customers additional functionality," Levin said. "The use of open-source software as a way to speed development and reduce cost is transforming software development organizations. To realize the full potential of open source, developers require a solution for both search and management. "

"Black Duck is the ideal company to take over the Koders technology and our developer community," said Darren Rush, founder and CEO of Koders. "Koders has attracted a larger and more loyal audience than any service of its type because of the quality of our results, and now Koders is strategically positioned within the larger context of open source component reuse.”