Black Duck Joins Open-Source Research Team

The software company is a corporate member of the Open Source Software Institute and will serve as a technical contributor to a research and development program between the U.S. Navy and OSSI.

Black Duck on Monday announced that it has joined the OSSI to help promote open-source software in governments and academic institutions.

Douglas Levin, chief executive of Waltham, Mass.-based Black Duck Software Inc., said he is "excited" to have his company join the Open Source Software Institute as a corporate member.

"OSSI is a nonprofit [organization] focused on increasing the use of open-source software in the U.S. federal government, and state and local governments," he said.

As part of its relationship with OSSI, Black Duck will serve as a technical contributor to an open-source software research and development program between the U.S. Navy and OSSI, Levin said.

This program is part of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between OSSI and the Commander, Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, he said.

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The project is a three-year research and development project to explore the use of open-source software within the Naval Oceanographic Offices for Web services, scientific computing and enterprise architecture systems, Levin said.

"Theyre looking at a variety of open-source software on different platforms," Levin said. "And theyre trying to evaluate the use of open-source for systems supporting war fighting."

"We are thrilled to have Black Duck Software join the Open Source Software Institute," said OSSI executive director John Weathersby in a statement.

Weathersby also cited Black Ducks participation in the Navy project and added, in the statement: "Black Duck Software is filling a unique niche in the adoption of open source within government and industry enterprise systems. By enabling IT and policy decision makers to qualify and quantify the scale and scope of their commitment to open source software, Black Duck is helping to prove that open source is a viable, mainstream offering and can serve as a stand-alone or complementary element within any enterprise system."

Levin said Black Ducks expertise in helping organizations manage software licensing compliance is key to the OSSIs goals.

Black Ducks protexIP product enables users to manage the use of open-source components by automatically analyzing projects to find open-source software, then checking for licensing issues related to the code.

"We automatically analyze projects to discover IP [intellectual property] and license issues, and then provide documentation of the software assets," Levin said.

Meanwhile, Levin acknowledged the existence of Palamida, a San Francisco-based competitor that has released a new version of its tool that offers similar functionality to Black Ducks.

Read more here about Palamida announcing the appointment of Mark Tolliver as president and chief executive of the company.

"Wed like to welcome them into the software compliance space," he said.

"Weve been here for two years," he added. "We have a substantial amount of technology weve deployed at lots of places."

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