January 8th, 2008
What software classes owe each other
Over the Christmas holiday my high-school age son had to read Sumner’s “What Social Classes Owe Each Other.”
The answer, he said, was “simple respect.”
The same may apply to software, according to Black Duck CEO (and blogger) Doug Lewin Levin (right).
Black Duck software is proprietary, he admitted, but the company gives a lot of respect to the open source process and to the open source movement.
“We were an active participant in the drafting process for GPL Version 3,” he explained. ”We invested a great deal in that process.
“Equally we have an open source license resource center on the web tracking the usage of open source. This year you’ll see our effort expand to products and programs which are also supportive.”
On his blog, Levin estimates the new licenses’ use has doubled in just the last 3 months, with 1,191 projects using GPLv3 and another 171 using the LGPLv3.
Growth has been slowing on a month-by-month basis, he said, but he does expect it to ramp up as we go through 2008.
Black Duck’s current license compliance line-up includes protexIP, now on Version 4.4, its software development kit, exportIP for cryptographic detection, and transactIP, which is its hosted solution.
The transact roll-out is already a success, he said, with dozens of companies doing transactions without human intervention, and the company is adding professional services and international staff under a new executive vice president for field operations.
Levin makes no apologies for Black Duck’s proprietary stance, saying it’s driven by his enterprise customer base, and claims to have no fear of an open source project challenging his company, saying “we exist at the high end of the market.”
On the other hand, he isn’t smug. “Our primary mission is to help software developers of all types – open source, mixed source, and closed source.
“Some of our customers are proprietary, which is why we are – our knowledge base can be expanded to include proprietary. We have a lot of proprietary things in our database.”
But Black Duck’s product technology road map will include open source code outside protexIP.
Just because some code is proprietary doesn’t mean we can’t all get along, he concludes. A good thought with which to start the year.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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