BOSTON—Black Duck Software, a provider of intellectual property compliance-management software, announced at LinuxWorld here on Monday that SAS, a major business intelligence firm, will be using Black Ducks ProtexIP solution to provide open-source management for SAS product developers.
By using the ProtexIP system, SAS Institute Inc. hopes to more effectively use open-source software and bring developers, lawyers and business decision-makers together within an automated process, allowing them to better manage intellectual property and software license compliance.
ProtexIP provides companies with an extensive license and source code knowledge base that can be used to rapidly identify instances of open-source software and associated license conflicts in developers code trees.
ProtexIP enables enterprises to identify, track and manage license compliance obligations for software, internally across business units and externally with partners, suppliers, and communities.
Black Duck also announced at the show that it was improving ProtexIP by adding Custom Code Prints. This gives ProtexIP support for proprietary and commercial source code.
“Todays developer works simultaneously with internally developed proprietary software assets, software licensed from commercial suppliers and open-source software,” said Douglas A. Levin, CEO of Black Duck.
“And to extract the most value from the resulting work product, developers want to share the results internally and across company boundaries,” Levin continued. “In this environment, enterprises must feel confident that they can safely track the use of all source code and [be able] to manage compliance with all attendant license obligations.”
SAS found this new feature an attractive proposition.
“SAS maintains stringent control over our software intellectual property and that of our third-party and open-source partners,” said Patricia Brown, assistant general counsel for SAS, in a statement.
“Black Ducks ProtexIP system provides us with an intuitive system that automatically checks the source code and provides information about open-source usage. It identifies what we need to know early in the development cycle, assuring that everyone on the team can understand the guidelines and adhere to our licensing policies,” Brown said.