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On Monday, Black Duck Software Inc., a leading provider of software compliance management solutions, and SourceForge.net, one of the worlds largest open-source collaborative development sites, will announce that Black Duck will be able to use SourceForges program repository to make its software compliance program more efficient.
SourceForge.net, a subsidiary of VA Software Corp., hosts more than 103,000 open-source projects, and has over 1,100,000 registered users using its resources to accelerate their own software development efforts. Black Duck will host a replicated version of the SourceForge.net software repository.
The software program collection will be used to provide users of Black Ducks protexIP software compliance management platform with the assurance that their in-house developments are being checked for possible license and IP (intellectual property) problems against SourceForges enormous open-source program collection.
This deal is a follow-up to VA Software and Black Ducks earlier partnership. In that arrangement, the two companies announced an integrated product. This dual product brought together Black Ducks protexIP with and VAs SourceForge Enterprise Edition distributed development environment.
The protexIP system uses a knowledge base of “code prints” to uniquely identify programming code and its licensing information. This information is then used to validate whether companies are correctly using the open source code within their applications. When theres a problem, the program alerts developers and managers to possible license obligations and conflicts.
SourceForge, besides including open-source programs from many individuals and small groups, also includes software projects by NASA, Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., IBM and Salesforce.com.
“Our customers depend on having the most up-to-date and accurate information about open source projects to support their software development and compliance processes,” said Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck, in a statement.
“By partnering with SourceForge.net,” said Levin, “we can help businesses to safely expand their use of software from the worlds largest open source repository, and assure that our software compliance Knowledgebase remains the most comprehensive in the industry.”
“Increasingly we are seeing commercial organizations adopt open-source tools, technologies and techniques that have evolved on SourceForge.net; its becoming the way that all software will be developed, distributed and maintained,” said Jeff “Hemos” Bates, co-founder of Slashdot and editorial and operations vice president for VAs OSTG.
“We are pleased to be working with Black Duck to help companies better manage their license obligations, accelerating the adoption and migration of open-source software into more enterprises worldwide,” said Bates.