Black Duck Software Inc. is slated to announce Monday a significant expansion of the companys corporate advisory board, including some prominent entrepreneurs and proponents of the open-source model.
The Waltham, Mass., company is a provider of software compliance management solutions for governing software assets. The company has tapped seven industry executives and academics to help with its mission. Black Ducks customer base includes enterprises, vendors, law firms and other organizations worldwide.
The new advisory board members are Alex Aiken, Dave Bernstein, Dan Bricklin, Dave Flaschen, Ed Roberts, Jothy Rosenberg and Arthur Tyde, who have now joined Larry Rosen, an open-source and intellectual property attorney, as advisers.
According to Black Duck, Aiken is a computer science professor at Stanford University with a teaching focus on tools for detecting errors and checking specifications of software, identifying and testing open-source software, static program analysis and abstract interpretation, constraint resolution algorithms, and language design. He also is the developer of Moss, a system used at thousands of institutions for detecting plagiarism in software.
Black Duck officials said Bernstein is a 20-plus year executive with Rational Software Corp. and other concerns. Most recently, he drove the creation of the Eclipse Foundation to an independent open-source organization from its beginnings as an IBM-led consortium.
“From my work at Rational and from my experience setting up the Eclipse Foundation, it was clear that the lack of good process and automation for managing software intellectual property was reducing software productivity, introducing difficult-to-resolve project risks, and impeding collaboration among organizations seeking to provide better platforms for their collective user communities.” Bernstein told eWEEK.
Moreover, “I met Palle Pederson [Black Ducks chief technology officer] while seeking co-conspirators for the opportunity Ive been exploring [software applications for next-generation mobile handsets] and became interested enough in Black Ducks solution to the IP [intellectual property] management problem to meet Doug Levin [Black Ducks CEO] and the rest of his team,” he said. “Theyre an excellent group addressing an important problem in software engineering, and it was clear that I could add value—so I agreed to help. Together, weve developed a set of best practices for managing software intellectual property, further expanding the opportunity for automation and value to software development organizations.”
Meanwhile, Bricklin is an authority on software licensing concepts and strategies for open-source software adoption, Black Duck officials said. He also co-developed VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.
Flaschen is a partner in the private equity investment firm Castanea Partners and a speaker on corporate governance.
Roberts is the David Sarnoff Professor of the Management of Technology and the Chair of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship Center.
Rosenberg is an entrepreneur and vice president of software at Ambric Inc. Previously, he founded and served as CEO and CTO of Service Integrity and co-founded GeoTrust.
And Tyde is the CTO of The Free Standards Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open-source software standards, most notably the Linux Standard Base (LSB).