Doug Levin's CEO Blog

Please GO TO new blog location:

2008-06-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

www.opensourceadoption.com

New Blog, New Beginning

2008-06-13T20:15:00.000-07:00

I have switched location of my blog to www.opensourceadoption.com.

As Carlos Castaneda said, “Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.”

Following the acquisition of Koders.com, an increasingly larger community of Black Duck customers and our expanding presence in the open source software development community, we have decided to make my blog a communications hub by (1) establishing it as a separate website, (2) adding more analytics for us, and (3) connecting it to social media sites which have user-generated news links such as Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These changes are more than superficial. It turns out that all my efforts to increase traffic actually helped BlogSpot more than it helped bring readers to my Blog.

In addition, I have changed the name of the blog to “Open Source Adoption” to reflect the change in the focus of my blog to more of a focus on open source software, software development, and business related concerns.

These changes are designed to help bring together Black Duck’s and Koders.com’s communities.

It is important to note, however, that I will maintain the personal writing style, stories and insights into culture and life. For example, I hope to update my blog posting on tomatoes this year. This blog will therefore not be strictly about business.

Gentle reader: Let me make the following recommendations:

Please update your bookmarks. This blog’s new URL is opensourceadoption.com.

Please update RSS feeds. The links have changed, so you have to update your RSS feeds.

If you don’t like RSS feeds, subscribe by email. We have added this email subscription feature based on reader requests.

Please use Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and StumbleUpon user-generated news and blog links. You may need to create an account on these services, but it’s well worth it.

I'll see everyone on the other side.

Software development gets agile

2008-06-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Agile software development is a conceptual framework for software development that promotes development iterations, open collaboration, and adaptability throughout the lifecycle of the project.

There are many agile development methods; most minimize risk by developing software in short amounts of time. Software developed during one unit of time is referred to as an iteration, which typically lasts from two to four weeks. Each iteration passes through a full software development cycle: planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, and testing.

Agile software documentation is no different than software design and coding. It too is produced as required by stakeholders. An iteration may not add enough functionality to warrant releasing the product to market but the goal is to have an available release (without bugs) at the end of each iteration. With the conclusion of each iteration, stakeholders re-evaluate project priorities with a view to optimizing their return on investment.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that agile software development is on the rise. There are documented case studies of BMC, Lockheed, Litle, and others that demonstrate their adoption of agile development and the resulting expansion. It also turns out that companies using open source software tend to use an agile development methodology.

We believe that one of the “demand drivers” of Black Duck products is agile development. Agile is not a requirement for Black Duck adoption, but if a company is doing software releases in short iterations, they have strong incentives to accelerate development through reuse – from either source code management systems, open source code repositories, third parties, or various combinations of all three – and they will look to automate their development processes.

See, recycling is never a bad thing.

GPL and Related License Adoption Rates

2008-06-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

Black Duck led the industry by introducing an accurate depiction of GPLv3, LGPLv3 project adoption and usage in graphical and tabular formats.

For those of you who may not have noticed Black Duck has expanded our Open Source License Resource Center by introducing AGPLv3 adoption and usage. Once again, the numbers displayed are accumulated month-to-month. The data is updated daily and the current month's statistics are to date only.

Tracking AGPL is important because it represents a separate platform for Web and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. It is relatively new, approximately half the age of the GPLv3, but if broadly adopted will expand the reach of FOSS licensing to many places it has not impacted before: Web and SaaS applications, portals, e-commerce and search sites, and others.

It’s worth watching.

What do you think about AGPL as an OSS license?

Black Duck Named to SD Times 100

2008-06-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

Black Duck Software has been named to the 2008 SD Times 100 and we are honored to be included on this prestigious list and to be recognized as a company meeting the ever- expanding and ever-evolving needs of developers worldwide. The list recognizes the leaders, innovators and influencers in software development. Black Duck was honored in the Tools category, which acknowledges companies that help developers “churn out functional and usable code.”

In short, at Black Duck we help developers, attorneys and company management work together – especially on a geographically distributed basis -- to find, select and use open source and third party components. This results in greater efficiencies.

Alan Zeichick, Editorial Director of BZ Media's SD Times, said "The software development industry is led by innovation. When choosing the 2008 SD Times 100, we carefully considered each organization’s products and services, reputation with development managers, and the new ideas and thought leadership that it has brought to the industry. Thanks to the SD Times 100 winners, like Black Duck, the art and science of software development continues to advance at a rapid pace."

SD Times is written for software development managers, has more than 60,000 subscribers in more than 131 countries.

Black Duck in the SDTimes 100

2008-06-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

SD Times bestowed another distinction on Black Duck naming us one of 100 “companies, tools and open-source projects that made December 2007 a far more productive and efficient time to code than January 2007”.

Team Black Duck: Nicely done!

Corporate Application Development in NA & Europe

2008-06-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

Summary from Forrester Research survey of 526 North American and 270 European companies (multiple responses accepted)

“For custom-developed applications, which development platforms do you use?”

	N.A. %	Europe %
Microsoft .NET	68%	52%
Mainframe or midrange platforms	45%	34%
Proprietary 4GLs	27%	19%
Java, Java EE, J2EE	48%	47%
Rich interface in a browser	38%	36%
Open Source frameworks	15%	16%

Source: Forrester Research, Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2007

Microsoft's mesh-ianic complex

2008-05-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Both Nietzsche and Kanye West famously used these words.

That was the message that came across loud and clear during Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie's talk on Wednesday at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. Ozzie argued that competition from Google and free and open source software (FOSS) have forced Redmond to innovate instead of resting on their Windows/Office laurels. A cynic might reply that Microsoft has little choice in the matter if it wants to stay in business.

But what I found most interesting about Ozzie's talk was what he said about the future of computing. In a word: mesh. As May Jo Foley blogged at ZDNet.com, Ozzie continued to talk up distributed, mesh-like operating systems, possibly beyond Windows. To make that happen, Ozzie stressed the need for software development kits (SDKs) that can be used across many different devices. Just coincidentally, Microsoft is moving in this direction with its much-discussed Live Mesh and accompanying Live Mesh SDK.

Software developers are taking a wait-and-see attitude regarding Live Mesh, but remain hopeful in part because of the success of Visual Studio. As one of them wryly commented to BBC News technology reporter Maggie Shiels, “The proof is in the pudding but at the moment it's all demo-ware and advertising.”

Microsoft has a huge opportunity to earn some serious street-level support in the years to come by meshing well with the likes of Apple, Google and YouTube. An open mesh sandbox – supporting open standards and FOSS – will go a long way to deliver the hearts and minds of developers.

Open source software on Windows? You bet.

2008-05-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I blogged about Microsoft's new if-you-can't beat-them-join-them attitude towards open source software. But have you noticed how much open source software already runs on Windows?

Sure, everyone knows about Firefox, now used on nearly one-fifth of all corporate (mainly Windows) desktops, but there's so much more on offer than just Firefox these days. Surf over to Open Source Windows, and you'll see what I mean. Here are a few categories you'll find: Instant Messaging, Email, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Sound Recording, FTP, IRC, Security, and even Accounting. It's a whole new world out there for Windows desktop users – and I haven't even mentioned open source SaaS.

IP is no laughing matter ... or is it?

2008-05-24T05:29:00.001-07:00

PatentlySilly.com is a humorous outpost on the Web that catalogs the latest and greatest of the oddball patents that get awarded in the U.S. each month. Reading about these actual patents is great -- the Weed Cutting Golf Club and Pet Operated Ball Thrower are two of my recent favorites. PatentlySilly.com is a little like The Onion, but for real.

And that brings me to my main point: developing software as a corporate asset and intellectual property is serious business. At Black Duck, we've built our entire company around empowering organizations that engage in component-based software development – that is, almost every company that builds software – to successfully navigate the IP waters by managing licensing issues for all the open source code they find and reuse.

Without the threat of lawsuits hanging over their heads, these companies can focus on what's really important – planning the next corporate weed golf.

Have a great holiday weekend even if you don't play golf.

Copyright is cool

2008-05-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

This morning the highly affable Michael Geist spoke at the informative Mesh08 conference in Toronto. Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor and copyright expert, made a very persuasive case that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Web 2.0 tools are very effective at influencing governments, companies, and communities.

Geist asserted we are in the midst of a “New Normal” where advocacy empowered by mashups and social networks is impacting public policy. But despite this New Normal, politics drives policy even as politicians are increasingly paying attention to the political ramifications of online advocacy. Geist cites the Canadian blog Angry in the Great White North, Fair Copyright for Canada, Wikileaks, and Open Net Initiatives.

Geist argues that people are interested in copyright because it impacts their daily lives, whether they use the Web for general use or as consumers. For example, hyperlinking to content is potentially libelous, as Geist himself found out last year (Geist v. Crookes), and the use of orphan copyrighted material (or material seemingly out of copyright) can also bring legal challenges.

More significantly for music and other digital media fans, Geist is on a Richard Stallman-like crusade against DRM. He managed to convince many Canadians to oppose the government's anticipated copyright legislation (Fair Copyright for Canada – the FaceBook global group he formed has 40,000 members) and government officials ended up withdrawing the proposed law. DRM isn't dead yet, though.

With all these activities, and especially his fair copyright work, Geist looks like the Larry Lessig of Canada. I suspect that’s a moniker that he would embrace.

Windows on the XO laptop

2008-05-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

At a fund raiser last night for City on a Hill honoring Nicholas Negroponte, he said and the New York Times reports today that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project will put Windows XP on the XO laptop after becoming a Microsoft OEM. Adding Windows to the XO will add approximately $3 per unit for Microsoft’s licensing fee, and the extra hardware required to run dual-boot (running both Windows and Linux) systems will add another $15 to $17 or so to the cost of each machine. Limited runs will begin next month.

This is an important move by OLPC, one with serious consequences. “'I think our goals are dramatically enhanced with Microsoft's decision and this partnership because we will reach many more children,'' Negroponte told the Times. ''There are now many more countries prepared to look at the XO and collaborative learning and some of the things we stand for.''

The dual boot option will accommodate less-developed countries with needs for open source software and other OLPC functionality, and the need for business critical applications, like Office, supplied by Microsoft. This won’t mean that more adults will use XO; it will mean that children will have a longer run with XO and it won’t be relegated to lower school laptop use exclusively.

Microsoft makes its peace with open source software

2008-05-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

Microsoft appears to be warming to open source software (OSS) over the past few years. It seems like a lifetime ago -- 2001, actually -- that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was calling Linux a “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” And Redmond's saber-rattling about unspecified patent violations seems to have quieted down considerably.

Sometimes the software world feels like the weather in New England -- just wait a while, and things will change. Now Microsoft has a new site detailing its relationship with OSS. And the thing is, it really does have one these days. Surf over and see for yourself.

You may be wondering, What's Microsoft's angle? A glance at the site's FAQ reveals this:

The Microsoft open source strategy is focused on helping customers and partners be successful in today's heterogeneous technology world. This includes increasing opportunities for business partners regardless of the underlying development model. In addition, it includes increasing opportunities for developers to learn and create by combining community-oriented open source with traditional commercial approaches to software development.

In other words, as Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy Bill Hilf puts it, Microsoft wants to make OSS a legitimate and important part of Microsoft's strategy and thinking. Don't expect them to open up the source code for Windows anytime soon, but at least this shows that Microsoft knows open source isn't going away (hence the language about “today's heterogeneous technology world”). Better to make the best of it instead of being left in the dust.

The FAQ adds that CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website, and Port 25, its public portal for the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, will continue to exist and provide ways for the Java world to use Microsoft and open source technologies together.

The new Microsoft site represents Microsoft's expansion of interest and positioning relative to OSS. It’s very positive and contributes to a larger case for OSS in the enterprise and in Microsoft's own accounts.

The risks of using FOSS

2008-05-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

The Software 2008 show within Interop 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada, this week was well attended. Approximately 18,000 attended, according to the Interop powers-that-be. (I think that this number was real considering the salmon-run from the hotel into the convention center each morning and the crowds during lunch. This reinforces my belief that Las Vegas is back as a technology industry destination.)

I was suffering from a nasty cold, but I enjoyed speaking on the “Open Source Governance: Recognizing & Dealing with the Risks of Free Software” panel. There were around 50 people in the audience, mostly from IT, development, and legal spheres of influence. It goes without saying that audiences expect content directly related to the title and description of the panel. Several audience members left when the discussion moved towards open source benefits and did not focus on the risks.

Free and open source software (FOSS) provides incredible economic, productivity, technology/IP and many other benefits. However, if FOSS proliferation is not managed properly, it can lead to legal, technical, and/or organizational issues which can have negative consequences for a business. An increasing number of companies have recognized these realities and are adopting processes, technologies, and expertise to both foster and govern the use of FOSS within their companies.

Any discussion of FOSS risks should include a prominently highlighted caveat that when risk management is done right, it is straightforward, not disruptive, and not expensive. It’s just part of the FOSS adoption process in all organizations, enterprises in general, and especially publicly held companies.

Twitter: Where’s the pony?

2008-04-29T16:23:00.000-07:00

Make no mistake: I love Twitter. I blogged about it here. Since then I have used Twitter religiously on my BlackBerry, via Web clients, and on my laptop through FaceBook. It’s fun, stimulating, and informative.

With marginal revenue and no apparent business model, Twitter recently sought a $150 million valuation (that's "pre-money"), but seems to have settled for $60 million. According to several well-placed sources, that was good enough to get the company another another $15 million in a third round of VC funding. Last summer it raised $5 million on a $20 million valuation.

So where is the pony from a enterprise value and VC point of view? That remains to be seen, especially given Twitter's considerable challenges with revenue generation such as online advertising. Still, some VCs see gold in them thar hills, believing that Twitter's buzz will turn into bucks sometime in the near future.

For a few more thoughts about valuing Twitter, see here, here, here, and here. Some analysts talking about Twitter have resorted to arguing that business plans and early profitability are overrated. Maybe it's just me, but that sounds suspiciously similar to the arguments dotcom investors made around 1999. And just how many of their beloved Web startups are still around in 2008?

Pravda Coverage

2008-04-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

Today Black Duck got heavy press coverage for acquiring Koders. (Here for a selection of articles.)

There is no question that my favorite article appeared in Pravda where they included a picture of a black duck they snapped themselves. Totally cool.

Black Duck Software Acquires Koders, Inc.

2008-04-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Black Duck Software has acquired the assets of Koders, Inc., the company that launched koders.com, a popular on-line search engine for open source software and other Web-downloadable code. Koders.com gets over 30,000 developers each day searching and accessing open source code, methods, examples, algorithms, and solutions in over 766 million lines of code written in over 30 languages and identified with 28 software licenses.

With this acquisition, Black Duck is doing even more to help software development teams find, reuse, and manage open source software by incorporating Koders’ search capability into our highly successful open source product portfolio. Specifically, the combination of Koders software code search engine with Black Duck’s Code Center, released in the first quarter of this year, is very exciting, and protexIP customers will benefit as well.

Black Duck will add code and metadata from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase to Koders’ search database, the industry’s most complete database of open source and third-party code, containing more than 520 million code files, representing many billions of lines of code.

Black Duck now offers the industry’s most comprehensive array of capabilities for incorporating open source software into application development:

Code search: With Koders, Black Duck gains a powerful code search engine that can search for specific code functions or solutions in repositories across the Internet.

Component search: Black Duck Code Center enables development teams to search a KnowledgeBase containing hundreds of thousands of open source components. Developers can internally publish a catalog of approved open source components to facilitate reuse within their own organizations.

Fragment/File search: Black Duck protexIP automates the review of code and finds unapproved code fragments, files, or entire components that were integrated into a code base without adhering to a company’s open source review policies. This capability can be used to uncover licensing violations, security issues, unsupported open source code, and outdated code.

Going forward, we are committed to maintaining and improving the koders.com site as a free resource. All of us at Black Duck are excited to be doing even more to advance the cause of open source software. The revolution continues.

Open source gets SaaS-y

2008-04-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

When you think of open source software (OSS), Software as a Service (SaaS) might not be the first thing that comes to mind, but OSS plays a role in SaaS just the same. It's there in CRM offerings from Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies, and SugarCRM.

A new Gartner Group report -- Open Source in SaaS, 2008 – notes that while OSS plays a big role in SaaS infrastructure now, that role will grow even larger over the next few years. In fact, Gartner predicts that a whopping 90 percent of SaaS providers will use some amount of open source software by 2010. This won't guarantee cheaper or even better products, of course, but the trend is certainly a vote of confidence in the power of OSS to fuel the growth of SaaS. The key to open source SaaS in the long term will be having the right mix of platform, community, and developers.

American broadband in the slow lane

2008-04-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

Last month there came the news that eight countries beat the U.S. in broadband penetration. Now there's another new report, this time from the Economic Policy Institute, confirming that the United States is pulling up the middle when it comes to “high-speed internet penetration.” Out of 30 countries surveyed, the U.S. ranks 15^th with 22 high-speed connections per 100 residents. By contrast, Denmark tops the list with 34 high-speed connections per 100 residents, followed by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Korea, and Norway.

It gets worse when you look at new broadband technologies. For example, 35% of Japan's broadband connections are fiber optic, versus just 3% for the U.S. Average download speeds in Japan are 61-megabits per second, while the average U.S. broadband user has to make due with 1.9-megabits per second. It isn't a pretty picture, to say the least.

Last fall I testified before Congress on this very issue, stressing how vital higher-speed broadband is to American competitiveness in the global economy. A half a year later, I feel compelled to ask the politicians the same question that's in those Verizon commercials: Can you hear me now?

A beautiful day in the open source neighborhood

2008-04-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

Mr. Rogers could have been singing about open source software (OSS), with all the good news that seems to be coming out these days.

First there's a new report from the Standish Group that calculates open source software saves companies $60 billion a year over proprietary software. That's billion with a “b.” Of course the Standish Group spins this as “a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies,” but we all know what that means – organizations are looking for the cost savings and performance benefits that only OSS can deliver, and it seems they can't replace their proprietary software quickly enough.

Then there's even more good news from the analysts at IDC. They state that the market for quality assurance and testing of OSS is expected to grow by as much as 150% between 2007 and 2008. IDC is suggesting that the market for OSS will expand as companies tighten their belts during the expected recession, with the OSS service market growing right along with it.

As my good friend Dave Rosenberg blogged over at CNET, “It's a great time to be an open source company.” I couldn't agree more.

Nantucket Conference 2008

2008-04-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

The final agenda for this year's Nantucket Conference has been published. As a prior participant, I wanted to make sure that readers knew about it. Highlights of this year’s agenda include IDG CEO Pat McGovern, IDEO CEO Tim Brown, Maven Networks CEO Hilmi Ozguc (a General Catalyst company that was recently acquired by Yahoo), Bob Metcalfe, and EnerNOC CEO Tim Healy. The sessions are always well organized and moderated but the networking over drinks and dinner is the best year-round in NE. I like this year’s “Game Changers” orientation and mix of cleantech, software, Internet and other companies, VC, markets and entrepreneurs. Too bad industry events that week will keep me on the road. Check it out here.

Questioning the Gartner Report

2008-04-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Gartner’s SaaS-versus-OSS TCO finding triggered some of the most interesting responses to a lecture I delivered yesterday at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, on the state of Open Source Software. (Ottawa is the home of the Senators NHL hockey team, Renegades CFL football team, Lynx MLB baseball farm team, 67’s OHL hockey team, and the Wizards soccer club – if you didn’t know.)

The students, entrepreneurs, prof's and VC in the audience asked me great questions about the Gartner report:

Does this mean that enterprises in 2012 simply want applications residing in front of the firewall as opposed to installed on servers or storage systems in the data center?
Does this mean that virtualization vendors’ central value proposition will fade by 2012?
Does this hearken the return of the mainframe with its centralization and value per/MIP (old) and green (new) value proposition?
Does this mean cloud computing is a shoo-in?
Won’t direct OSS costs diminish as the market matures?
Or, does this mean that OSVs are expected to hike their prices in 2010 and 2011 and shift the cost curve to make SaaS more attractive?

In truth, it is almost always a combination of these factors that result in cost curve and associated adoption curve shifts. It is my experience that SaaS applications (SalesForce in particular, but also Constant Contact, Adesso Systems, and others) require customization, additional support beyond what is provisioned, and training is almost always needed. SaaS has many direct and hidden cost categories that are similar to OSS, but the IT value proposition is significantly clearer and more favorable. This value proposition is driving the adoption of cloud computing applications such as Google Apps.

OSS consists of an operating system, infrastructure, middleware, applications, utilities, and so on. Many of these are free as in beer or free as in freedom. But OSS has hidden costs, such as training, documentation, consulting, and other costs. Did the Gartner research take these into account?

One question asked by a bright Carleton student is especially interesting and worth putting out there to readers: What about open source SaaS?

Linux and TCO in 2012

2008-04-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

Gartner has spawned a debate with its latest Open Source Software (OSS) research. Gartner researchers asked more than fifty analysts to comment on the state of OSS in their respective areas of research, and the result was The State of Open Source 2008 report. Among other findings, this report determined that by:

2013 a majority of Linux deployments will have no real software TCO advantage over other operating systems;
2012 90% of enterprises will use open source either directly or in an embedded form;
2011 open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers; and
2012 Software as a service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred enterprise IT cost-cutting method

Radcliffe, Fulkerson, and others have argued that the rate of OSS adoption will be much faster. Still, this is proving to be a seminal report. Already it has impacted the thinking of a lot of people in the worlds of OSS and SaaS the same way that Forrester Research's Linux Tipping Point, IDC’s “Open Source Biggest Trend in 20 Years,” and Saugatuck Technology’s “Booming Support for Mission-Critical Application Workloads on Linux” were seminal when they were published in 2006.

My love affair with the OLPC's XO laptop

2008-04-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I’ve fallen in love. (Sorry ladies, it's not that kind of love: I’m as constant as the Northern Star with respect to Susana.) My love affair involves a laptop. It happens so infrequently because there have been so few great breakthroughs in personal computing technology since I hauled around the Compaq Luggable in 1987.

I'm not saying that because I’m a curmudgeon; I can fall in love with technology. To prove that point, let me admit that I’m a little bit giddy while writing this.

Here’s why: For the last week I've been using the “$100 laptop” by the folks at the One Laptop Per Child foundation (OLPC). OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte gave one to Susana and me. Nicholas invested in MessageMachines, and I greatly admired him as an entrepreneur and an IT intellectual before he gave me the XO.

The XO laptop -- it's called the XO because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child -- runs on Linux with a wide-ranging suite of open source applications for basic laptop users. The combination of an open source operating system and applications is the best means yet of lowering the total cost of ownership, which is open source software's (OSS) primary consumer benefit. Then there's the built-in wireless connectivity that helps bridge the digital divide by giving children worldwide access to a network-ready laptop. This fact alone makes Negroponte worthy of a Nobel Prize.

What's interesting is that this OSS-based laptop will absolutely lead to proprietary software and hardware sales. While the XO doesn't come preinstalled with Microsoft XP or Vista, children and their teachers will need more sophisticated software applications, networking and hardware capabilities over time, so they'll graduate to higher-end hardware. There’s no CD/DVD drive in the XO at all, for example, and no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. As the children grow up, they'll naturally migrate to proprietary products, which are fine with me. To adapt a phrase from Richard Stallman, I believe “the future is hybrid,” as opposed to purely open.

More on the XO's openness: I discovered a button located on the keyboard that allows children to view the source code (what XO refers to as the “programming”) behind certain applications. The XO laptop’s highly accessible and flexible user-interface, called Sugar, also promotes sharing and learning. This makes the XO a true OSS machine, from its philosophical underpinnings all the way through its uncomplicated functional capabilities available with one touch of a keyboard button.

My favorite feature is The Neighborhood, which provides, to quote the documentation, a

View of all the connected XO laptops within a child’s community, and what activities they are sharing. Each child is represented by a different color. If there is a shared document or activity being collaborated on by a number of children, it will show up within this view.

The Neighborhood provides an easy-to-use view of the network meshwork in the neighborhood, but it also helps facilitate interactions with immediate “friends” and the building of a community. When combined with The Friends, The Home, The Activity views and Browse, XO provides all the elementary functionality of a desktop plus a means of stepping up to more advanced applications, such as SynthLab a mini-lab for acoustic- and electronic-circuit construction.

For an adult, it takes a short time to adjust to XO's looks. It has a shiny green-and-white plastic outer cover, a handle and two leaf-like antennas. It looks like DreamWorks went out to create Shrek’s personal laptop based on a Fisher-Price design.

The XO is spill-proof, rainproof, dustproof and ruggedized for impacts due to being dropped. There is no fan on this little wonder, it’s as silent as a Caribbean wind gust and it weighs just 3.2 pounds. It gets six hours of heavy activity or 24 hours of reading battery life from one charge. (The battery is made of innovative lithium ferro-phosphate, costing $10 to replace and is good for 2,000 charges, compared to 500 for a regular laptop battery.) It has a nifty built-in video camera and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration. It also has a microphone, memory card slot, gamepad controllers and graphics tablet. The XO is the complete personal computing laptop for children and adults.

There's just so much to love about the XO laptop. I look forward to seeing how it will give new hope to the children of the developing world. In 10, 20 or 30 years, I believe we'll witness a new generation of IT leaders who are getting their start even now on these small green-and-white machines.

I really hope the Nobel Foundation is paying attention.

Huge First Quarter '08 OSV Funding

2008-04-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

According to the 451 Group, the first quarter of 2008 was a monster period for VC funding of open source ventures with the amount raised hitting $203.75m, up from $100.40m in the same quarter of 2007.

Here are Matt Aslett's analysis:

The amount of funding in 1Q08 just beat the previous record, of $193.7m, set in 4Q06.
There were 20 open source funding deals announced in the quarter, beating the previous record of 17, set in 1Q05 and 4Q06.
Of those 20 funding deals, 17 had a disclosed value, giving an average deal size of $11.99m.
That is the second highest average deal size ever, behind the $13.84m recorded in 4Q06, when there were 14 deals with a disclosed deal value.
In comparison, there were 11 deals with a disclosed value in the first quarter of 2007, giving an average deal size of $9.13m.

My trends posting for 2008 did predict a general decline of venture funding for OSVs in favor of funding of software ventures with open source underpinnings. I still think this situation will happen but it appears more so in the future than in 2008.

Pay-for-Play Is Counterproductive for Event Attendees

2008-03-29T03:42:00.000-07:00

Software industry events, like the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), just completed in San Francisco, should have a prominent warning sign posted on the event’s hotel doors, keynote stage, and website just like those appearing on cigarettes and liquor packaging. The warning should read: “Warning: Paid Content.”

Gentle reader: If you unknowingly sit through a keynote at OSBC there is no risk of physical injury, cancer or other serious illnesses. The risk is feeling a sense of boredom, knowing you are wasting your time and exposing yourself to undisclosed agendas and unadulterated self-promotional material, delivered, with shocking frequency, by underprepared speakers. This could lead to disappointment and sometimes angry blog posts. Nothing more.

Is OSBC the best the business side of the industry can offer? Is networking the primary reason why someone should attend an event? Is this the way we ought to expand the open source industry?

While the stated purpose of OSBC is to bring together senior business people “to collaborate on business models, strategies and profitability for open source use” much was lost in the implementation.

Specifically the content at the OSBC was off target. And pay-for-play was the major cause for the content being recycled, self-promotional and bereft of vision.

InfoWorld is largely responsible for this pay-to-play problem. The quality of OSBC content is their responsibility after all.

To be sure, some of the content at OSBC was terrific. Larry Augustin’s smoothing open source purchases and Raven Zachary’s panel on converting the OSS lead funnel were super-valuable because they were practical and attentive to audience needs. Both Larry and Raven balked when I complimented them. Their sessions were fraught with risk because the content was based on both contemporaneous operational knowledge and audience participation.

Hopefully next year we will have an OSBC that helps expand business, technology adoption and the industry all at once. This, I have to admit, is wishful thinking.

The times, they are a-changin'

2008-03-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

Change is a part of life and a part of business. Recent developments at Black Duck have brought that point home to me.

Doug Johnson, Black Duck’s CFO for the last two and one-half years, is retiring from the company and will be sailing and living in the Caribbean for three years with his wife Tammy. He is in the process of selling his houses in Boston and Kennebunkport, Maine, and his cars too. Almost everyone envies him.

Ken Goldman, Senior Vice President and CFO, has joined the company to fill the void. Ken comes to Black Duck with over twenty five years of financial experience. Most recently, Ken was CFO of Salary.com, where he led their successful IPO. Prior to that he was an investment banker with Mirus Capital Advisors, and held CFO positions at Lodestar Corporation, Student Advantage, Media Map, ShopLink, and Liberty International. Ken began his career at KPMG, is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), and received his Accounting and Management degree from Syracuse University.

Also joining the executive team is Peter Vescuso as Senior Vice President of Marketing. Peter spent the last six years at Cantata Technology (formerly Brooktrout Technology). He has twenty years of technology marketing experience, including senior marketing positions with Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, and Apollo Computer Company. Peter has a Master's degree in Engineering Management from Dartmouth College and Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from New York Institute of Technology.

At times there were open chairs, but now we have a Dream Team in place.

Turnover, generally speaking, is not desirable, but it is also not unusual for startups. The lives of people working in a startup, and in subsequent stages of a rapidly growing company, experience changes in their life, their goals, attitude toward work, etc. Change is natural and expected.

As Black Duck has changed, grown and matured, and we’re fortunate to be able attract the highest-qualified candidates and ultimately hire the very best and brightest in the marketplace.

Eight European countries beat U.S. in broadband penetration

2008-03-20T05:07:00.000-07:00

Isn’t it time the United States developed a national broadband policy?

Eight European countries are now ahead of the United States in broadband penetration, according to figures released today [Wednesday]. "We have four countries that are world leaders -- Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland," said Viviane Reding, the European Union's (EU) telecommunications commissioner. "We have eight countries that have higher penetration rates than the U.S. and Japan. We are not doing badly at all."

Badly! Europe is kicking America's butt!

If my tech-savvy American readers still aren't depressed enough, the EU press release has more gory details:

Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden are world leaders in broadband deployment with penetration rates over 30% at the end of 2007, says the European Commission’s 13th Progress Report on the Single Telecoms Market issued on 19 March. These EU countries, together with the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, all had broadband penetration rates higher than the US (22.1%) in July 2007. 19 million broadband lines were added in the EU in 2007, the equivalent of more than 50,000 households every day. The broadband sector generated estimated revenues of € 62 billion and Europe’s overall penetration reached 20%. However, there is considerable scope for further consumer benefits from a reinforced single market, strengthened competition and reduced regulatory burden for market players.

The U.S. has been against national planning because we do not want to take on the appearance of a centralized economy. We think it's undemocratic and un-American. The common response to calls for central planning or even national strategies is “let the markets decide.”

The problem is that the markets are not addressing the broadband problem fast enough, and as a result the U.S. is losing its competitive edge. I testified in front of the Senate on this issue (read the blog post here).

Yes, I know there are some other very serious problems that need national attention: the economy, the environment, human rights (check out Tibet) and so on. But we can't let IT slip off the radar screen either.

I hope that America's anemic broadband network begins to become an issue in the presidential campaign. In the past, IT issues did not seep into the national political discussion, probably because they were perceived as too techie. But if ever there was a bona fide “pocketbook” issue this year, making sure we have the infrastructure in place to keep millions of IT jobs in America must surely be it.

The good news is that there are changes are afoot. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch identified Barack Obama and John McCain as the two candidates with the most progressive, thoughtful and “right” positions on IT. So no matter what happens on the Democratic side between now and the party convention, we're guaranteed to have at least one IT-aware candidate on the ballot in November.

Let's just hope the politicians do something about the broadband problem -- and soon. Otherwise our economy could soon be facing a giant blue screen of death.

Total Growth of Open Source Software

2008-03-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle, OSS researchers at SAP-Labs in Palo Alto, CA, have quantitatively analyzed the growth of more than 5,000 active and popular open source software projects and shows that the total project size (measured in source lines of code), the number of new open source projects, and the total number of open source projects are growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. This work shows that OSS is expanding at an exponential rate into new application areas.

You can find this groundbreaking research here.

The AGPL is now OSI Approved

2008-03-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

Today the OSI announced that they had approved the Affero General Public License (AGPL 3.0).

According to Mark Radcliffe, attorney with DLA Piper, “the AGPL can be very useful for companies that are concerned that their software will be modified and then used to provide services without having the modifications returned to the community.” For more information, see his blog post here.

So far the following companies or projects have adopted the AGPL, according to the Black Duck KnowledgeBase and Open Source Resource Center: 3rd-space, AJAX Chat - Open Source Web Chat, Eastwood Chart Servlet, Eyes of Lynx, Funambol, Infonomix, LogiLogi Gallery Generator, MyTab, OgOg, PBooks - Open Source Accounting, ProcessMaker Open Source, Tine 2.0, Tournament Pool and Bracket Tracker, Wikidot, allocPSA, hyperdump, plutext-server, and sovix. This is not a huge number of adoptions but there could be more since now the license has been officially approved.

Customer Advisory Council 2008

2008-03-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday we held Black Duck Software’s 4^th annual Customer Advisory Council or “CAC” at the Network Meeting Center in Santa Clara, CA. The CAC is an opportunity for Black Duck to interact, in depth, with some of our best customers, to share our plans with them, and to take input from them about where they need us to go in the future to better fulfill their needs. Participants included architects, IT, legal counsel, and project managers representing leading software, device, embedded systems, and financial service companies.

In 2007 I wrote my first Customer Advisory Council blog post here about the benefits of CAC's.

We brought an all-star crew from headquarters including Jim Berets – Sr. Director of Product Management (who did a great job organizing the meeting), Bill McQuaide – EVP of Product Development, Andi Zink – VP of Engineering, Richard Sherrard – Black Duck Code Center Product Manager, Tim Bridge – SVP of Sales, Bob Lapides – EVP of Field Operations, and Peter Vescuso, our new SVP of Marketing.

Our major goals for the event were to preview Black Duck’s future direction, obtain customer feedback on needs & priorities, and map these to our plans. It is critically important for us to understand our customer’s internal challenges and establish open communication channels for future cooperation. We also want to start building a community where customers learn from each other by sharing their ideas, processes, and successes. The most powerful sessions, however, were three customer presentations on protexIP deployments, customizations using the SDK, and application licensing models.

After a long day we had cocktails and dinner at Parcel 104 at the Santa Clara Marriott.

I think the CAC attendees value not only our vision but the tangible progress we have made and the two-way communications channel we have established. Equally, I think the Black Duck attendees value the opportunity to get in-person feedback from our customers and learn from each other.

Today's software license landscape

2008-03-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

Nine months after the introduction of GPL 3.0 and LGPL 3.0, what does the open source license landscape look like?

As of the end of last month, the number of GPL 3.0 licenses released is 1,574, and number of LGPL 3.0 licenses released is 219. That represents 2,817% and 4,280% growth, respectively, over nine months.

However, the rate of month-to-month growth has now slowed to 19% and 18% respectively. Most experts attribute the GPL adoption rate slowdown to three factors:

GPL 2.0 being good enough and having support – for example, the Linux kernel continues to be licensed under GPL 2.0 due to the influence of Linux creator Linus Torvalds

The patent termination issues are going away

DRM is a non-issue for most open source projects

With the “bloom off the rose” on GPL 3.0, announcements with explicit references to GPL 3.0 are not occurring as often now as they did several months ago. Nevertheless, there are still software developers who intend to use the GPL 3.0 license or will eventually adopt it. Stay tuned.

The “Great Dane” moves on

2008-02-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

It makes me sad to have to say that Palle Pedersen, Black Duck’s CTO for four years and one of the company’s longest-serving team members, has gone to a startup in the wilds of Boston-area ventures. He remains an active advisor to Black Duck and is still very much in our flight corridor.

Back in April 2003 Palle and I met to discuss Black Duck’s technology plans at a Starbucks located in Washington Square in Brookline, Mass. I was looking for an outsourcing company, and Palle was doing that kind of thing then. We bonded after a few minutes of chatting over coffee.

Over his ensuing years at Black Duck, Palle always made intelligent and consistently remarkable contributions to engineering, product management, marketing and other meetings, public conferences, customer visits, and many other discussions. For me, his highest calling at Black Duck was functioning as my technical backstop. For every cockamamie idea I came up with, he gently and effortlessly (but nonetheless assertively) provided reasons we shouldn't do it, or alternative solutions, or additional features, perspectives, and the like. He was invaluable: He made me a better all-around executive and visionary.

The “Great Dane” is returning to a place where he is most comfortable: A zero-stage startup. His blog continues here.

Best of luck, Palle. You made a great, great contribution to Black Duck. Talk to you soon.

Black Duck PSA for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

2008-02-25T18:11:00.000-08:00

Massachusetts Office of Business Development (MOBD) is doing a radio campaign on WEEI / WRKO entitled: “Massachusetts. It’s All Here”. This campaign consists of vignettes from leading Bay State companies. After an introduction by Governor Deval Patrick, I do a testimonial featuring Black Duck Software and how we did all our design and development here in Massachusetts (instead of outsourcing or offshoring).

Click here for the 30 second spot or one minute spot.

An open source license that's easy on the conscience (and your cholesterol)

2008-02-22T20:03:00.001-08:00

Finally! An open source license that's more interesting than the Beerware License! For the uninitiated, the Beerware License (latest Revision 42) was written by Poul-Henning Kamp, “UNIX guru at large”. This humorous license grants users the right to use Beerware-licensed source code in exchange for buying Kamp a beer (or other such adult beverage) if they should ever meet him at a neighborhood watering hole.

A much more serious open source license in the ExtTLD license. According to Matt Asay at CNET, “The ExtTLD license has some restrictions that might make even Richard Stallman blush.”

Here's why: Software or components under this license cannot be used in connection with the development and manufacture of products that involve animal testing, products whose ingredients might come from testing on animals, or genetically modified organisms involving animal genes.

That means your software engineers can't be involved in animal testing, and neither can your company's products or services. (“Animal products" are defined as “meat, seafood, honey, fur, silk and eggs” -- a vegan’s odium list.) Also explicitly excluded is participation in animal-based sports, such as rodeo riding, and the transport of animals. That means the transportation or haulage sector, and anybody developing satellite navigations systems and applications, is explicitly excluded.

Is the ExtTLD license an open source code license or some strange variant? What’s clear is that it is the healthiest license and easiest on the conscience.

The Body Politic & Larry Lessig

2008-02-21T07:26:00.001-08:00

According to the WSJ, Larry Lessig, Stanford Law School Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Center for Internet and Society, may run for an open congressional seat in the San Francisco area.

Larry's candidacy could make the political process more accessible to voters via his blogs and speeches but he'd have to dumb it down significantly. His slideware consists of just one word which he then verbally expounds upon. His style is great for the technorati but not necessarily effective communications for the masses.

All a-Twitter

2008-02-20T18:41:00.000-08:00

In the last three days I have added Twitter to my blog, Facebook, BlackBerry and Firefox bookmarks. You can send a Twitter message, or "Tweet," from any of your registered devices or webpages.

So far Twitter has not changed my life. I was hoping to be able to quote “Sam” (Natalie Portman’s character), who famously said in the movie Garden State that The Shins "will change your life." Sorry, not this time, but Twitter is cool.

The buzz around Twitter is significant among the “highly mobile-Web 2.0” or “mobile Web” crowd. It’s like a new form of instant messaging about tiny chapters in your life. The Twitter website says it’s a “social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface” that answers the question, “What are you doing?” Every time you see something interesting on the Internet or in life, you Tweet it. It’s very ephemeral.

The buzz around Twitter has invited rabid technology comparisons (some say it is a microblog, others say it is SMS, or IM, or a Web 2.0 communications vehicle). I think it’s most like IM from a communications standpoint because you are sending a short messages to a public audience through a small text box by pressing the submit button. This is one of its strengths. Also, there have been a lot of blog posts written about it (see here and here) and discussions at Web 2.0 events. There's a “newbie’s guide to Twitter” here. Twitterholic tracks the top 100 Twitter users here. And so on.

Here are two weird things: The heaviest Twitters in the Boston area are PR people. This has no doubt contributed to the buzz. Also, the demographic for Twitter is not the classic F-book crowd. It’s an older demographic. (See Chris’ blog post for more data.)

Suffice to say that I like Twitter because it informs a whole bunch of people who I care about and who care about me. I also like it because it is the next cool thang.

A Deeper Dive into FOSSology

2008-02-15T04:52:00.000-08:00

In December I blogged about HP’s FOSSology, a framework that enables the scanning of code. The first plug-in for this framework looks for license text within source code using templates for about 270 licenses and license variants.

I did not see deep investigative reporting in the press coverage of FOSSology, so I thought I'd write a blog post that does a deeper dive.

Why did HP open source FOSSology? HP transformed FOSSology into a open source project because some of their customers learned that HP had an internal tool that HP intended to offer as a product, and they asked HP to open source it. These customers wanted a free tool and HP wanted to generate services revenue to recover any costs associated with their efforts.

We, at Black Duck, feel that there is always room for free and open source (FOSS) code scanning tools in our market. However, we feel that a FOSS offering is a good thing only if the code committers are fully committed. SourceForge is rife with projects with only headers and a small pile of code that is now dormant or unfinished because of the lack of commitment.

I expect HP to apply resources to this FOSSology opportunity. I also expect that the increased awareness in the marketplace created by HP’s offering will increase interest in Black Duck solutions.

Most Black Duck customers want to get out of the business of developing and maintaining homegrown compliance management tools and are instead adopting commercially supported products that give them the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal. A FOSS project does not accomplish this objective, even one – maybe especially one – that was started by HP. While a FOSS project will provide the benefits of community development, it will not allow an enterprise to eliminate their internal efforts. Most enterprises want to deploy their engineering resources on building new products or applications that contribute to their competitive advantage, not internal tools. This may be especially true during a recession, at least if the past is a guide to the present. We believe that only a small number of organizations and corporate developers will be interested in the FOSSology approach.

By comparison, Black Duck’s flagship product, protexIP, has information on over 1,245 different licenses. protexIP does code analysis of a code base (as opposed to code scanning) using multiple analysis techniques – including code matching against a KnowledgeBase (KB) of more than 152,000 open source projects and 485 million (to be exact: 485,191,760) source files, dependency analysis, and license text search. We maintain the integrity of protexIP’s KB by maintaining it ourselves.

The Black Duck approach also results in the KB being the most comprehensive and relevant code analysis product on the market. Lawyers, developers, and managers seeking an answer to what's in the code base receive answers because protexIP is the best available technology (BAT) on the market. BAT is a legal standard, not just an IT goal.

An engineering-oriented, and by extension legal, example of protexIP as BAT occurs when an application uses binary files or in cases where source code has been cut and pasted but copyright text and license headers not retained. A simple license text search will not work in any of these cases.

In addition, what most enterprises are looking for, rather than just a list of licenses discovered, is an accurate report at the conclusion of the code analysis process that identifies each component in use, its version, the corresponding license, how the code is being used, and whether that usage is approved. As most of the FOSS community understands, the impact of FOSS licenses is not determined exclusively by whether the code is present or not – it’s in how the code is mixed together, and how it’s ultimately used.

For example, the use of GPL-licensed tools is very different from the use of GPL-licensed code in an ISV’s product. So in addition to its analysis capabilities, protexIP enables customers to understand these relationships, and to put the code through an approval process whereby each usage is well-understood and approved.

Ultimately, protexIP is an enterprise-class solution that enables developers, lawyers, and management to share information about software-as-an-asset. It’s not a scanning tool -- it’s a lot more. Many of the stories about FOSSology didn't get down to this level of detail about code analysis, but corporate customers will. We look forward to it.

SFLC Publishes Legal Guide on FOSS

2008-02-14T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), who describe themselves as a "provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)", today published a very useful in-depth primer that introduces the reader to the legal issues related to FOSS. See it here.

This web-based guide was written by members of SFLC's staff to cover "a variety of legal topics and their practical application to free software development". These topics include copyrights and licensing, organizational structure, patents, and trademarks.

Its a very helpful primer that is potentially helpful to newbies and advanced practitioners alike.

Jonathan Kraft at the Vilna Shul

2008-02-13T21:53:00.000-08:00

Tonight Jonathan Kraft – the president and chief operating officer of the Kraft Group, the holding company of the Kraft family’s varied business interests, and also the president of the three-time Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots – was the featured speaker at the historic Vilna Shul.

The Kraft Group has diversified interests including a huge paper and packaging manufacturing and forest products distribution operation, a sports and entertainment business, and a real estate development company. Additionally, they are involved in private equity investing – especially in early stage technology companies that are synergistic with the other companies in the Kraft Group, and philanthropy.

Jonathan painted very compelling pictures of leveraging the lessons the Krafts learned building a $1 billion packaging business, and their applications, to build the Patriots into a football super-power. He also reflected on his family and personal involvement with Judaism and charity. Jonathan made the evening wonderful by being insightful and offering a wonderfully candid insight into his businesses and NFL football.

Why you should shun VC conferences

2008-02-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

I've received a number of phone messages and direct mail solicitations for the Venture Capital Workshop and Conference, which will be held in New York City on Tuesday, March 4, and in Boston on April 8.

I was surprised to get invitations to this type of conference for two reasons. First, because Black Duck Software is not an early stage venture, and we don’t need the money. And second, because I thought this form of investor jamboree was dead. Maybe that was wishful thinking. It seems like such a '80s thing to do.

The appeal is of these conference is that – for a fee – an early stage company can find a room full of eager venture investors who want to hear an investor pitch. This beats having to make individual pitches on Winter Street in Waltham, MA, or on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA, or in front of standalone VCs on the east and west coasts.

I think these conferences are a total waste of time and money for entrepreneurs seeking venture capital. Let me tell you why.

You remember that room full of VCs? Well, it actually contains an audience consisting mostly of other parties with other interests. Or undesirable investors. One quarter of the room is occupied by other entrepreneurs waiting their turn to make a pitch, listening to pitches to polish their own. Approximately one half are accountants, attorneys, business brokers, consultants, and others who will try to sell you their services. And the remaining quarter are junior, ill-advised, or simply stupid investors. (A slightly old but still relevant description of an entrepreneur's experience at a venture conference can be found here.)

My Dear Brothers and Sisters: There is a better way.

First, do a Google search of your area VCs. Type in, for example, “Boston venture capital”. VCs like to invest locally, no matter what they say about doing remote investments. Traveling is not fun, detracts from their current investments, and cuts into sourcing time. If you are located far away from the center of VC clusters (Silicon Valley and Boston), then use Google to vector in on some closer locations. Also, I would recommend getting at least one advisor who has been VC-funded and network your way into a VC pitch.

Second, call on a partner in the firm with an interest in your venture area. If you do not know any partners in the firm personally, you have a choice: Cold call them starting with their executive assistant (the key to scheduling any partner), or identify a principal or associate. Get their names from their website.

Alter your approach according to your audience. With a partner, you should go in assuming you have one shot. With a principal or associate, come prepared to encounter stupid questions, but your aim is to make them your evangelist inside the firm. In either case, you objective is another meeting.

Finally, bring a great story -- your total addressable market, growth plans, and other elements of the business. Answer the question: Is this a billion dollar idea? If it isn't, how can it built to be?

Whatever else you do to attract the attention of VCs, don’t waste your valuable time and money at a venture conference. You're far better off taking that time and money and churning it into your business.

How the open source community is expanding

2008-02-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

The definition of the open source software (OSS) community consistently came up during the brainstorming sessions and conversations at the Open Source Think Tank.

The OSS community used to be defined as the people who wrote code or documentation. A more current, general definition is anyone who adds something to the process or code in an OSS project. Now the definition also includes bloggers.

Someone postulated that "you must have an itch to scratch to be a part of a community". The itch has evolved. Commercial OSS provides focus and attention, and commercial OSS companies have caused the OSS community to expand.

Food for thought.

Open Source Think Tank - Part One of Many

2008-02-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

The 3^rd Annual Open Source Think Tank on February 7-9 at the Silverado Resort, Napa Valley, Calif. is themed “The Future of Commercial Open Source”. Andrew Aitken, CEO of Olliance, kicked-off the opening remarks with some trends from his personal pov:

“Balkanization” – the availability of open source is more fragmented today. Used to be SourceForge was the one site to go; now there are “clumps of communities not tied together”.
Scarcity of Resources – tremendous demand for business and technical personnel. Can impact the adoption of OSS.
Growing Complexity – numerous open source projects, proprietary software moving into OSS, etc. Not changing for the foreseeable future.
Consolidation – will increase over the next few years. Larry Augustan thinks that there will be 30-50 deals per year. Ave large deals: $300m. Many small deals.

Andrew concludes that "the future is Open Source", at least over the next few years, and it will become a standard part of the computing environment and way business is done.

Maureen: Get Another Job

2008-02-06T19:58:00.000-08:00

Recently, a reporter wrote an article about Black Duck Code Center that was fiction and written with antagonism and not journalism. It is trash or, more accurately, fiction. While she has a history of misreporting BDS and other companies’ news, this story came about without an interview, touching base with our PR firm Schwartz Communications, or even reading our press release, so I feel compelled to write this blog post.

One of the great pleasures of my job is doing interviews with the press and analysts, and subsequently reading the results. I see an interview as a collaborative project between a journalist and me, with a goal of informing readers about something newsworthy -- a new product, business relationship, market trend, or something innovative and unique. The two parties engage in this project assuming that both parties will be fair in their use of facts and opinions. No matter what the news being reported, the objective of both parties is knowledge.

There is one immutable truth: In order for journalism to work, both companies and journalists have to be objective and use facts. That requires journalists to divulge any financial relationships, prejudices, or other influences that would shape a story or blog posting. It's just the right thing to do. This is not only a canon of journalism, but the general ethical standard underlies most communications between people.

In my mind the journalists I interact with most frequently carry with them a capital “J” in their occupational title because of the deep respect I have for them. They come from an ethical and professional place. They are friendly but trained not become too close to those on their respective beats. This group is not small. It includes Scott Kirsner, Innovation Economy columnist for the Boston Globe, Darryl Taft, and Steven Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek, Sean Kerner at internetnews.com, John Waters at ADT, Don Marti at LinuxWorld, Mary Jo Foley and Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet, Paul Krill of InfoWorld, and many others. They use facts and write articles that are accurate and informative. They understand the nature of relationship between companies and journalists.

Alas, there are some exceptions to this rule.

The title of the article that touched off this post is an article by Maureen O'Gara entitled “Black Duck's Code Center Close to Hatching: Under a pressure from HP Black Duck says it will roll out a thing called Code Center.”

O’Gara (or an editor who wrote this headline based on her article) pulled that title out of the air or someplace else. Two weeks ago HP’s FOSSology was announced, and last week Code Center introduced. This headline, and the article, is like trying to compare apples and zebras. Maybe in O’Gara's mind these events are related, but on planet earth they are not. I truly hope this is fiction and not an attack on Black Duck by O’Gara or something inspired by our lightweight competition.

O’Gara writes: “Under a bit a pressure now that HP has open sourced its own IP identification system as FOSSology, Black Duck says it will roll out a thing called Code Center by the end of the quarter.”

Let's get the chronology straight: Code Center has been under development for 22 months. The original spec was written in the fall of 2004. HP influenced nothing -- the inspiration came from our development team and pressure came from customers – they want this product from us to compliment protexIP! Time to market is everything these days.

Roll out “a thing” called Code Center? Why didn't she call our PR agency or Black Duck to get the facts on Code Center?

O’Gara continues: “Previously Black Duck has been called in as something of an after-thought.”

In one sentence she has insulted hundreds of companies that are using Black Duck’s protexIP in production, dedicating many hours to planning its deployment, integration into processes, and producing reports that were only dreamt of before 2004 when we started shipping the product.

Finally, O’Gara writes: “…Code Center is also supposed to work with whatever component usage policies a company might have and make them less labor-intensive.”

Readers might remember O’Gara’s 2005 run-in with Groklaw blogger Pamela Jones, which led more than a few to question her ethics. (Summaries of the feud are here, here and here.) Others credited her for her “dogged” questioning. In fact, O’Gara’s bio congratulates her for asking tough questions and “getting to the heart of stories.”

Personally, I’d welcome incisive questions about Black Duck and would appreciate any honest attempt to get the facts straight. If such an effort is too much, perhaps she he ought to consider another profession. I simply wish she’d stop pretending to be something she’s not -- a journalist.

Podcast Interview

2008-02-04T18:54:00.000-08:00

LinuxWorld Podcast featuring my discussion with Don Marti about Black Duck Code Center.

It can be accessed at http://www.linuxworld.com/podcasts/linux/ and is featured at the top of the page. (12:29)

Black Duck Software on Wikipedia

2008-01-28T11:27:00.000-08:00

Today there's a new species of black duck on Wikipedia: The African Black Duck, American Black Duck and Pacific Black Duck have way cool and interesting entries but now you can also read about Black Duck Software.

Innovation in the Open Source Software Era

2008-01-28T04:56:00.001-08:00

In the technology industry, people always predict that innovation will come with loud fanfare – a great, big product announcement at a trade show, etc. – when in most cases, it happens quietly, all around us. So it has been with component-based development. This trend was hyped in the 1990’s during object oriented programming era with its perfect acronym “OOPs”. When it fell short of expectations, the term went out of vogue. Today it is not exactly a common phrase, but quietly and steadily, it has become a common parlance and practice again.

Managing a software development organization used to be about project management and execution. You gathered available resources into a hierarchical organization, directed them toward a goal, and managed the critical path. Anyone who manages that way today is a dinosaur.

The savvy development manager today knows that the resources outside his/her organization are equal to or even more important than the resources on payroll. Today, growing numbers of development managers are leveraging code from third parties: open source, vendors, partners and other internal groups (which in large organizations resemble third parties in many respects). I see surveys weekly showing how much open source code companies are bringing into their source base. The numbers vary from as low as 15% to as high as 60%, but the surveys have one thing in common – the amount of open source being used is increasing.

As usual, developers are way ahead of management in this trend. That’s always both good and bad. Leveraging external code can help get companies to market faster, but there are issues which must be managed such as hidden license obligations and security vulnerabilities. Also, a company doesn’t get as much benefit from leveraging code if they don’t provide a mechanism for developers to standardize around specific components or even versions. For example, if multiple components or multiple versions of a component proliferate within an organization it becomes a huge support and maintenance effort. Developers are resourceful, but they won’t necessarily self-organize around a product platform. Management brings that to the table.

Today Black Duck is unveiling our second flagship product: Black Duck Code Center. It's a soup-to-nuts management framework for code reuse that is propelled by the Black Duck KnowledgeBase – the very same KB that powers protexIP, our first flagship product. Now, in one place, enterprises can track and manage open source and third-party code throughout the entire software development lifecycle. Think of it as an enterprise clearinghouse for all kinds of code.

Black Duck Code Center accelerates software development by assisting developers with the search and selection of code that meets their needs, drawing on the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. Then Black Duck Code Center speeds the organizational approval – a developer can kick-off an approval with the push of a button, and Black Duck Code Center walks the component approval through legal, security, risk, QA or any other approvals that a company requires. Black Duck’s automated process gives management the visibility and oversight that they need while freeing developers from burdensome process and bureaucracy. Furthermore, it allows companies to create and internally publish a catalog of approved components which allows engineers to share their work with their peers.

Black Duck Code Center facilitates the creation of an “in use” approved components list called a Bill-of-Materials (BOM) for a software application. Once that is done, Black Duck’s other major product, protexIP, can be used to analyze whether the actual BOM matches the approved BOM. Black Duck has analyzed code from hundreds of companies and our experience is that it is rare for a code base not to contain something unexpected. Good practice requires both front-end coordination and back-end checks and balances.

If you want to learn more about Black Duck Code Center, please have a look at the press release we posted today on the Black Duck home page. We're confident that Black Duck Code Center is a required innovation that acts as a clearinghouse to help enterprises fully realize the benefits of open source and third-party code.

Visible Measures' Launch & Demo

2008-01-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

Visible Measures is a very cool media technology company that I have enjoyed advising since it's inception. Tomorrow they are doing a product launch and demo of their audience behavior measurement suite at DEMO'08. Visible Measures helps publishers and advertisers better understand Internet TV audience viewership with data on audience engagement, video virility, and advertising effectiveness. Like it's analog -- Neilson Ratings -- that measures conventional TV audiences, Visible Measures delivers behavioral data to video sites and content creators working with a significant amount of video content and advertising firms to measure and substantiate advertising ROI. See their demo.

Are you CEO material?

2008-01-24T22:40:00.000-08:00

Today I spoke at Harvard Business School's Entrepreneurship Club. This was a really enjoyable experience because it gave me an opportunity to interact with future entrepreneurs. The club has 450 student members and likes to invite local business leaders to talk about what it takes to start and grow new companies.

I started my talk with the 6 essentials of a startup CEO's life which I called the "6P's":

Planning: Never stop doing this. There's no substitute for strategic thinking, but planning goes on everyday starting with outlining “ToDo’s” for the day/week each morning and interspersed into many different disciplines in the company and activities.

Proving: Making sure your board, employees, analysts and the press knows about your progress against plan, and company's direction and performance.

People: Invest in your employees. Encourage them. Train them. Help them to grow professionally and your company will reap the benefits.

Producing: Whether a product or service customer alignment, differentiation and quality are all keys to successful ventures.

P&L: Oversee pricing is an important and pivotal business activity that CEOs should be involved with and retain. Another key is driving or monitoring demand generation – depending on the stage of the company. Lastly, a CEO has to be the initiator of cost savings even when a strong CFO is in place.

Personal: Don't neglect your family. As it relates to emotional intelligence (so-called "EQ"), learn to recognize patterns to identify problems and communicate solutions.

In my experience, a lot of CEOs neglect the 6^th P on this list. Don't do that. As the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

There are also some more general Dos and Don'ts that I presented to the club. I learned some of these lessons the hard way, and I hope the aspiring business leaders in the club will learn my mistakes.

DOs:

Do what you are good at and love to do. That might be the CEO job -- but then again it might not!

Do hire people who have more expertise in certain areas than you.

Do identify your personal weaknesses and address them, and then identify more weaknesses. Rinse and repeat.

Do get lots of advice from your board, advisors, coaches, mentors and others, but then make your own decisions.

Do come to accept you have to drive the company in order to achieve and overachieve every single day.

DON'Ts

Don’t letothers' expectations or some “dream job” picture lead you to pursue the CEO job.

Don’t operate under the belief that strategy alone is the key to startup success. There are many keys.

Don’t assume that there are formulas for exits, challenges, competition, etc. Every situation is unique.

Don’t place your interests before the interests of the board, executive management team, your rank-and-file employees and investors.

Don’t give up your personal life. There's more to life than work, and being a well-rounded person is key to avoiding burnout. Don't be another supernova in a suit.

I leave you with some words from that sage of the business world, Michael J. Fox, who played the enterprising Alex P. Keaton on the 80s TV sitcom Family Ties: “I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.”

Wise advice indeed.

HP's FOSSology

2008-01-24T18:47:00.000-08:00

On December 19^th, 2007 I blogged, welcoming FOSSology’s imminent introduction. Today HP made the formal announcement.

As I mentioned in my previous post, FOSSology shows how significant the market is for Black Duck’s products. In essence, a very, very small part of what Black Duck does can now be accomplished with the FOSSology project, led by HP.

I fully expect, and hope, that many corporations and FOSS projects will download and use FOSSology. It will show corporations how prevalent FOSS code is in the applications they build, deploy and sell. It will enable FOSS projects to understand and clarify the licensing of their code.

After these initial uses, companies will see the need for comprehensive code analysis, professional services, insightful reports and valuable audit trails. I think that FOSSology downloads will ultimately provide potential customers for Black Duck Software. Black Duck builds on top of what FOSSology provides, based on years of development of our own solutions, to answer the question, “Yes, I use open source in my applications, now what?”

For FOSS developers, FOSSology will reveal how much cut-and-paste development actually goes on. The lack of clear and accurate license labeling of FOSS has impeded the adoption and reuse of these projects by others, who are cautious about using or contributing to code whose license terms are unclear or conflicting. A FOSS tool which free and open source project developers can download and use to clean up their often confusing licensing is a benefit to everyone, everywhere who seeks to use or contribute to FOSS.

While I welcome FOSSology, I am far less optimistic about HP’s efforts to turn FOSSology downloads into enterprise deals. This market is already very well established, given Black Duck’s success to this point (note my previous post about Black Duck’s customer success in 2007).

Some of my concern revolves around HP’s word choice. HP labels FOSSology as “a software governance initiative to help companies address the legal, financial and security risks faced when adopting free and open source software (FOSS)”. Using the terminology “initiative” is a hedge the HP lawyers must have imposed on the FOSSology developers and marketers. Or is it? Is this a commitment to deliver a real solution or an effort to throw some code over the wall to start a conversation? Let’s see if something substantial can be developed — only time will tell. At this point, FOSSology is a framework, not an enterprise solution.

I’m happy for the OSLO development team, who are dedicated followers of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. They deeply believe in the benefits of the bazaar and have finally transformed their philosophy into practice by releasing a FOSS project.

In the future, I hope to see HP selling, marketing, supporting, servicing and developing around FOSSology. I also hope corporations download FOSSology, because when they do, they’ll likely see the need for penetrating and comprehensive code analysis, great support, professional services, insightful reports and valuable audit trails. FOSSology, again, will produce more customers for Black Duck Software.

FOSSology does confirm how open source creeps into software markets as they mature. As a particular enterprise software market matures, it’s inevitable that the very basic technology involved is offered as an open source project (think JBOSS vs. BEA). What FOSSology shows is that Black Duck’s market is growing fast enough that the very basic, simplistic technology involved—literally step zero in what Black Duck does—is now available as open source.

On Monday, January 28^th, Black Duck will introduce our second flagship in our product armada. The market will see how serious and thoughtful we are about code analysis and component reuse. They will also see that the Black Duck approach makes sense for companies who want to harness the power of open source and third party components, mitigate business risk and accelerate software development.

It’s a beautiful world out there with lots of room for new ideas and technologies. A bold beginning is important, but it’s only a start. I look forward to watching FOSSology develop over time and hearing companies’ thoughts on it.

Happy Shining Faces

2008-01-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

We took a picture of the nearly 80 company employees yesterday with a wide-angle lens. The North American and International sales, professional services, and support groups were in Waltham for our annual sales kickoff so it worked out well. Nice picture. (Thanks Norm)

Fake Steve Jobs Cocktail Party

2008-01-17T23:35:00.000-08:00

Version 2.0 Communications and Atlas Ventures jointly sponsored a cocktail party and book signing this evening with Dan Lyons (picture left) of Fake Steve Jobs fame. Dan is great writer. IMHO FSJ is a tour de force.

This event was held at Rocca Restaurant on Boston's South End. Great food. It's now on my recommended list for event venues.

Click here for more pictures and the video.

10 Up-and-Coming Open Source Apps

2008-01-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

Matt Harley wrote an interesting article in Intranet Journal naming the “10 Up-and-Coming Open Source Apps”, as follows:

1) Gutenprint

2) Firewall Builder

3) TUTOS

4) Openads

5) Notepad++

6) Eraser

7) MPlayerOSX

8) Free Mind

9) KeePass

10) FreePOPs

All of these projects are in the protexIP KnowledgeBase in multiple versions.

Matt made a mistake in the article labeling the project KeyPass instead of the right name KeePass.

New Open Source Software Study

2008-01-17T11:22:00.000-08:00

A new study Indicates that Open Source Software's presence will increase from approximately 10 percent of key user on-premise software in 2007, to between 15 percent and 20 percent by 2010. Read more here.

Black Duck Software's Great Customer Growth in 2007

2008-01-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

We are already well into 2008, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2007. It was a phenomenal year for Black Duck Software.

Black Duck now has more than 575 customers, including a new customer list that includes NEC, Citrix, IONA Technologies, Lehman Brothers and QNX. We saw dramatic success internationally, with 93 percent year-over-year growth. In 2007, we established our international headquarters in Amsterdam, inked a reseller agreement with NEC in Japan, and helped our customers successfully navigate the introduction of GPLv3 (it helped that our executives were active on the committees that wrote the new license).

I want to personally thank Black Duck's employees and management team, whose commitment helped to make 2007 the successful year that it was. It is clear that we are providing a set of solutions that provides significant return for our customers, and I look forward to continuing to work with them in 2008.

For more details, see our press release online.

Raven Zackary's View of the OSS World (2006-2011)

2008-01-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

I met recently with Raven Zachary, Open Source Research Director for The 451 Group. He writes a blog, the 451's CAOS Report and lots of other stuff.

Here are some of the prescient things he had to say:

In 2006: There were four major events in the Open Source world: (1) the JBoss acquisition; (2) Oracle Unbreakable Linux; (3) and Microsoft-Novell collaboration agreement, and (4) Open Source Java. Funding – $546M, 58 deals, peak funding year. M&A – 22 deals.

In 2007: There were also four major events in the Open Source world: (1) GPLv3 and GPL lawsuits; (2) SCO bankruptcy; (3) More Microsoft Linux deals, and (4) New foundations. Funding (to date) – $324M, 50 deals. M&A – 30 deals, peak M&A year.

In 2008, we can expect:

Greater shift in activity to existing IT vendors.
Less funding, more M&A.
A new wave of business failures.
Continued talent shortages from core contributors.
SMB market adoption is a limited opportunity.

Very similar to my 2008 trends posting.

By 2011, we can expect:

Educated buyers.
Consolidation(s) of open source startups.
Diversification of Linux suppliers.
Federated support models.
Services model wins out.
Open collaboration and standards more important than code.

What was your reaction to Raven's view of 2011?

Boston VC Panel Discussion at the Vilna Shul

2008-01-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

Tonight there was a panel discussion held at the historic Vilna Shul entitled “The Venture Capital Industry: Looking Back on 2007 and Looking Forward to 2008” with three leading venture capital investor from the Boston-area: Larry Bohn from General Catalyst Partners, Jonathan Seelig from Globespan Capital Partners and Alan Spoon from Polaris Venture Partners. Scott Kirsner, Innovation Economy columnist from the Boston Globe, was the moderator and did a great job, as usual.

This was a candid, insightful discussion. An excellent panel Paraphrasing, here’s what they said:

With respect to 2007:

Alan: There is a great value at this time in this market for startup investments; venture investing is well positioned as an asset class.
Larry: the enthusiasm is back and innovation is back at rational prices.
Jonathan: Ditto points made by Alan and Larry, plus enthusiasm for web and capital efficient investments.

With respect to 2008 and beyond:

Alan: The rate of change is indeed accelerating. He will invest in portability and mobility; customization and vertical markets; e-commerce; the notion of cloud computing; life sciences – nanotech, stem cell research, and green or ener-tech, plus Asia.
Jonathan: Energy, technology and Japanese investment interests. He asks what is the right capital structure for these investments, in particular, ener-tech companies? Also investment interests include advertizing measurement of the effectiveness of media spending, and companies addressing the battle over the utility bill.
Larry: Indicated that the market has become frothy. Companies have to hunker down this year. If Boston-area companies are doing a C round, they should consider going to CA for investors.

There was some whining about Boston vs. CA. There was also concern expressed across the panel about a recession this year and it’s impact on investments, in particular, enterprise or B2B plays.

Other bloggers covered the event, including:

Chris Herot wrote a nice summary of the event on his blog.
Scott Kirsner wrote a brief summary on his blog.
Dan Bricklin wrote an thorough blog posting complete with pictures.

v3 Check-in: First of the Year

2008-01-07T04:39:00.000-08:00

One of the high points of the last year in technology was the introduction of GPLv3 and LGPLv3 back on July 28^th, 2007. I thought it was so important I wrote up a v3 status reports on adoption in August, September and October. By my last count in late October, there were 605 GPLv3 and 74 LGPLv3 projects.

The current status of GPL and LGPL v3 adoptions according to Black Duck is 1,191 GPLv3 and 171 LGPLv3 projects. This represents 97% and 131% growth respectively since that late October check-in posting. The current project-license adoption count also shows that GPL represents 87% of the v3 licenses; LGPL represents 13%. Thus, there has not been a discernible shift to LGPL. (Note: For a period of time the LGPL adoption rate superseded GPLv3 adoption. As I explained at the time this did not turn out to be a sustained trend.)

In my 2008 trends blog posting on 12/31/07, I indicated that “GPLv2 will continue to dominate, GPLv3 will grow steadily and the Affero license will be newsworthy”.

If one drills deeper in the data, it turns out that the v3 adoptions growth rate on a month-to-month basis has sharply fallen off. This is probably due to three reasons: (1) The novelty of v3 has worn off, (2) the GNU/Free Software zealots, as early adopters, have run their course, and (3) there is a seasonal factor; like software product introductions, few open source projects are introduced in November and December. Products introductions usually ramp-up in the first quarter of each year – especially in January – and peak in April and May, and September and October, during prime trade show season. But the falloff in v3 adoptions is worth monitoring.

I stand firm in the belief that GPLv3 adoptions will ramp up this year. I think the falloff is a natural part of the software introduction and adoption cycle paralleling product introductions.

Trends of 2008

2007-12-31T11:36:00.000-08:00

Each year I summarize the trends for the coming year. These trends are derived from things I know something about and especially from watching Black Duck’s business; talking to customers, partners and analysts; listening to our sales force and reseller channel; and taking note of market feedback and suggestions from Black Duck and other executives, and many others. (Fashion and celebrity trends are not included; wrt these topics I plead ignorance.)

This year I have identified seven (7) trends, or eleven (11) trends – depending on how you count them. I think this is the year of the market segment, so I identify four markets which will emerge in 2008. If you regard them as sub-trends you get 7; if you see them as major trends, you get 11 trends. In either case, there is significant market maturity in the open source arena so trend spotting is being more complex:

1. An increase in the number and magnitude of lawsuits and legal actions. There is no question that the most significant event in the FOSS-world in 2007 was GPLv3. Second most significant is a series of events-- the lawsuits and legal actions brought by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the BusyBox and other GPL software developers.

Simultaneously, Black Duck has seen a significant expansion in our business in 2007 for three reasons: (1) Companies have established and documented the controls necessary to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and have moved from "documentation" to "process improvements." Now they are figuring out how to automate those controls and reduce the cost of compliance. (Black Duck plays a role here as companies take control of their software assets); (2) the market for software compliance will evolve and expand over the coming years as more enforcement actions are taken, and (3) more corporations are thinking beyond compliance and realizing that Black Duck products are ideal for integration into new software development methodologies or the application development lifecycle.

The year 2008 will be the year of compliance and enforcement. It will also be another very strong year for Black Duck as we introduce a new product line expansion that will help software developers early in the application development lifecycle.

2. GPLv2 will continue to dominate, GPLv3 will grow steadily and the Affero license will be newsworthy. The introduction of GPLv3 was in many ways one of the defining events of 2007. In 2008 v3 adoption will continue to increase as more open source projects are released, but v2 will continue to be popular for projects involved with software distribution. It appears that v3 adoption is taking longer than expected because software developers and especially their attorneys have not warmed-up to v3’s new patent provisions.

We also believe that in 2008 the GPLv3 adoption numbers will not be as closely watched. Except for the first year anniversary of the introduction of v3 and lawsuit announcements, this issue will simply fade into the background. We believe that closer attention will be paid to the GNU AGPLv3 (so-called Affero) license, especially with respect to Google's and other on-line services' adoption.

3. VC funding for Open Source Vendors (OSVs) will decline. The US model for VC funding of FOSS projects was to identify an established project with a vibrant community and build the company from there. MySQL was the first big one; this year it will likely go public or be acquired. Many other OSVs followed in 2007 resulting in a significant industry. In 2008, there will be many fewer OSVs created from open source projects. Many of the ventures which were first funded in 2005-2006 will be sold or merged into other entities this year. Open source, however, will be a big part of the software development culture. It will continue to fuel the business models of innovative startups and new ventures, and will become the backbone of enterprise computing.

Another indication of market maturity is manifested on the marketing side as OSVs are finally learning to call themselves as market makers rather than relying on “open source” messaging as the primary go-to-market positioning vehicle. SugarCRM within the CRM market and EnterpriseDB in the database market are two examples of this trend. This will lead in stronger market differentiation for these players who mainstream their messages and result in more VC being invested in these OSV leaders.

4. FOSS use and OSV formations will soar in specific market segments in 2008:

a. Healthcare. A sector that has suffered from cost concerns from its inception will be receptive to open source adoption this year and significant growth in FOSS use. While there are quite a few open source projects in healthcare – such as IBM’s Interoperable Health Information Infrastructure (IHII) and Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (EOHF), both built with an open source framework, and the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) – in 2008 there will be significantly more standalone projects and use of open source in healthcare applications. The issues of reliability and security which have previously stymied its adoption will become a thing of the past. In 2008, the US healthcare sector will become a hotbed of open source software development – albeit on a small scale. 2009 will witness more widespread development efforts.

In the developing world, open source will play a major role in healthcare information systems and will make a big difference.

b. The Worldwide Mobile and Telecommunications Industry. Open source has been used aggressively by ODMs since the mid-1990’s as a way of driving down the cost of development. Embedded Linux and databases were first, and then some open source applications and utilities (such as Log4j) formed the M/T open source stack. Asterisk, the leading open source telephony platform, has emerged as a momentum driver, in addition to legal actions involving alleged open source license violations against telecommunications market leaders BT and Verizon.

c. The Government Sector, including Government Contractors. I was amazed to find that at the AFEI (www.afei.gov) Open Source Conference on December 11^th and 12^th, all the attendees referred to open standards as open source. (Bernard Golden of Navica had the same observation.) There are increasingly more federal government software development managers and IT managers who plan to use or adopt open source in 2008. This will drive additional adoption downstream: Among the big contractors, sub-contractors, SMBs (see below), minority businesses, etc.

d. Small-and-Medium Businesses (SMBs) will increase their use of FOSS in large part because it will be integrated into their practice areas by value-added resellers/integrators. Open source projects will also mature to address vertical requirements of SMBs. For example, a point-of-sale solution for dry cleaners is based on the open source OpenBravo ERP.

e. Inter-corporate (multiple large scale enterprises) projects in the US. Corporations working together on open source projects will think about their industry problems and solutions in a much more expansive way. Last year some projects gained significant traction. For example, the pharmaceutical industry has launched Farmavita.net solutions. Going forward, look for more industry collaboration around open source. One vertical ripe for this type of initiative is the auto industry.

5. Open Source adoption, OSV formation and Proprietary/Closed Source Software Maintain Market Share Balance. Many open source projects originated in Europe, such as SuSE in German; Linux and MySQL in Sweden; Mandriva, Zope and Plone in France; Drupal in Belgium; Alfresco in the UK, and others. Several countries like Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and others did not witness growth in open source adoption. This was due in part to the strong local base that Microsoft has established in these countries. In 2008, open source projects and adoption, and new OSVs, will grow substantially in Europe, especially in the smaller countries of Europe (i.e., countries other than Germany, France, and the UK).

Asian open source projects and adoption will continue to expand. However, the difference maker will be OSVs. European OSV growth is slow in the last 2-3 years than the US, but will catch up as VC funding turns down.

In 2008 proprietary/closed source software will not be impacted by this growth. In most cases proprietary/closed source software will maintain market share. In cases or segments where market share is lost (DB, CRM, etc.), overall market will be maintained by other segments where established product in very large numbers or new products (Windows, Office, point solutions, etc.) lead to a net-zero change.

6. Outsourcers will Use More OSS and Publish Code Contents. While many outsourcers have used open source aggressively since the year 2000, mainstream outsourcers, mainly in India, have been in a state of denial about their use of open source. As outsourcers in Eastern Europe, Vietnam and China pose significant competition to Indian outsourcers, the fierce, new competitors are using open source to gain competitive advantage.

In 2008, outsourcers worldwide will increasingly publish the contents of their code to their clients. They have enjoyed a honeymoon in recent years because enterprises have focused on project delivery as opposed to the contents of the deliverable. Enforcement actions and lawsuits by the SFLC will lead technology companies and enterprises to pressure outsourcers to provide complete reports of code contents with great specificity.

7. The final decline of LinuxWorld. In the early years (2002-3) LinuxWorld was an important incubator of LAMP stack projects and OSV formation. In those times, foundations were a major vehicle for involvement in the FOSS community, and the attendees were mostly hobbyists and small developers. The 2007 LinuxWorld was dominated by hardware vendors and maturing and established OSVs.

In the US in 2008, OSBC and vertical software shows will emerge as the new center of gravity for visionary business people and developers and LinuxWorld will further decline in significance. LinuxWorlds outside the US will continue to prosper as these markets gear-up in OSS adoption.

--- ooo ---

One of the fun parts of writing a blog is that you can actively and accurately refer back to your predictions, in a self-criticism mode, and monitor how you are doing. I will be interested to see how these trends play out. Another fun part of writing a blog is soliciting feedback.

Gentle Reader: What do you think of the trends outlined above?

Happy Birthday BDS!

2007-12-31T10:12:00.000-08:00

Many of you know the story: I was vacationing with family in Cancun, Mexico on December 27, 2002 and while suntanning and reading on the beach, I had the idea for Black Duck Software. I left the beach and went to my room. Two days later I emerged with a technology, financing and go-to-market plan that served as the company´s business plan. That was five (5!) years ago. Time has flown but what joy! I loved every moment.

Today Black Duck is a robust company with 85 employees, a beautiful balance sheet and an array of great business accomplishments. For instance, we just completed another record quarter. We have well over four hundred (400!) customers including many prominent enterprises, government and technology customers located in the North America and internationally.

The best part: Our people. I get comments from customers, partners, resellers, advisers, attorneys, analysts and others about Black Duck employees. Its pretty consistent: Smart, technical, polite, hard-driving and high integrity. More than the original idea, business model, technology, financial backing and other factors, the employees of Black Duck have made a world of difference.

That is, IMHO, our critical differentiator in the market and industry. When I look around at company meetings and other gatherings, it makes me so proud to count myself as a member of the Black Duck Software team. The bright shiny faces reflect all the qualities that people outside the company see and more. Those faces represent the qualities of people who will help us realize our next stage of growth starting on January 2nd, 2008.

So Happy Birthday Black Duck Software! and many, many happy returns.

Winterborn (This Sacrifice)

2007-12-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

And in the fury of this darkest hour we will be your light
You've asked me for my sacrifice and I am Winter born
Without denying, a faith is come that I have never known
I hear the angels call my name and I am Winter born

And in our Dying
We're more alive-than we have ever been
I've lived for these few seconds
For I am Winter born

Crüxshadows

Sightseeing among the glaciers

2007-12-26T19:54:00.000-08:00

Over the last two days I have been on vacation with my family in the Parque National Los Glaciares in Patagonia, Argentina. We had two awesome days: One day seeing the glaciers by boat; today hiking among the glaciers' peaks and valleys.

Above are some pictures. (I will add more pictures when I can access a bigger pipe. The Internet connections here are not that fast.)

No trouble with “tribbles”

2007-12-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

You remember the original tribbles episode of Star Trek: Communications Officer Uhuru brings a new pet on board the Enterprise, forcing Captain Kirk and his crew to do battle (so to speak) with the fuzzy creatures that multiply beyond all reason. (Warning: Plot spoiler ahead.) In the end, Darvin the Klingon has to come to the rescue, doing the dirty work of starving the little buggers to death so they wouldn't cause any more “trouble.”

“The Trouble with Tribbles” aired exactly 40 years ago on December 29, 1967. The famous episode was written by science fiction writer David Gerrold, who penned the script when he was a wet-behind-the-ears 23 year-old. Recently he tried to explain to The New York Times why the episode has been so memorable: “I think [it] worked because it was so coy.”

Or did he mean to say cute?

Tribbles, indigenous to the planet Iota Geminorum IV, are diminutive, mostly gentle creatures that produce a soft purring sound. Most sentient races find these traits to be endearing, but Klingons do not. During this episode Leonard “Bones” McCoy explains that tribbles have only two purposes in life, eating and reproducing, and they perform both of these functions well. McCoy concludes that tribbles use over fifty percent of their metabolism for reproduction.

As a 9 year-old boy, I watched this episode when it first aired. I loved how the tribbles vexed the crew of the seemingly invincible Enterprise. In my preteen mind, tribbles were beguiling and scary -- not cute. I responded to them like in the same way as Spock, who couldn't comprehend them, and the Klingons, who totally rejected their unwanted screeching and deficiency of belligerence. Their sheer volume was also scary to me. Growing up in New York City, I had seen sewers overflow with rainwater and snow banks that stopped everything, so the tribbles were like a natural disaster in my mind. I have seen this episode three or four times since it first aired, but my first impression will last a lifetime.

If you've got some time over the holidays, do yourself a favor and spend some quality time with the tribbles. You won't regret it.

Mark Radcliffe's “Top Ten” List of FOSS Legal Developments in 2007

2007-12-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

According to Mark Radcliffe, senior partner at DLA Piper and 25-year veteran of practicing law in Silicon Valley, the year 2007 was “the most active year for legal developments in the history of free and open source (‘FOSS’).” It was also a year of many “firsts”, including many important legal and industry developments.

Mark’s “top ten” list of FOSS legal developments in 2007 is as follows:

1. Publication of GPLv3

2. SCO’s Attack on Linux Collapses

3. First Legal Opinion on Enforcing a FOSS License

4. First US Lawsuit to Enforce GPLv2

5. First Patent Infringement Lawsuit by Patent Trolls against FOSS Vendors

6. First Patent Lawsuit by a Commercial Competitor against a FOSS Vendor

7. Microsoft Obtains Approval of Two Licenses by OSI

8. German Court Finds that Skype Violates GPLv2

9. New License Options

10. Creation of Linux Foundation

I would strongly recommend reading the details in Mark’s list at the link above.

Assessments of '07-'08 by Leading VCs

2007-12-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

On January 8th, 2008, there’s a panel discussion at the historic Vilna Shul moderated by Scott Kirsner, Innovation Economy columnist from the Boston Globe that promises to be really interesting. The panel is entitled “The Venture Capital Industry: Looking Back on 2007 and Looking Forward to 2008” and draws on three VCs from the Boston-area: Larry Bohn, Managing Director, General Catalyst Partners, Jonathan Seelig, Managing Director, Globespan Capital Partners and Alan Spoon, Managing General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners.

My hope is that Scott asks the panel about the deals they did in 2007 and expect to do in 2008. Are there any singularly distinctive deals done last year? Which were the best deals of 2007 by way of return and other VC-metrics? Which deals are illustrative of Boston-area investments and reflect differentiation from what’s being done on the left-coast? Will there be a change in investments in 2008. What can we expect by way of industry (VC and entrepreneurial) trends? And, of course, which VC threw the best holiday party?

FOSSology

2007-12-19T19:33:00.000-08:00

HP's has launched the "FOSSology" project with a "soft" launch yesterday. In late January, they will do a larger public announcement. To learn more about FOSSology, this is the site: http://www.fossology.org/

FOSSology is, as promised, an open source project released under GPL v2 and offered for free. We can now officially welcome HP to our market. FOSSology is a nice tool for developers. It will result in software developers being better informed about their use of GPL. That makes it a very worthy tool.

Nice work HP. Welcome.

A win for the good guys

2007-12-17T19:48:00.000-08:00

The Software Freedom Law Center's (SFLC) court case against Verizon for BusyBox GPL violations might still be pending, but they just got Xterasys to settle. According to the SFLC's complaint, they informed Xterasys back in 2006 that they were violating the GPL, but Xterasys took no action to rectify the situation until this week. According to internetnews.com:

As part of the settlement Xterasys will cease distributing BusyBox code until the SFLC can verify that Xterasys is in compliance with the GPL. Xterasys will also appoint an internal person to ensure GPL compliance. There is also an undisclosed financial sum that Xterasys will pay.

Needless to say, this is a major victory for FOSS and the GPL. Keep it up, SLFC. You're on the side of the angels.

HP’s Open Source Code Analysis Solution

2007-12-17T16:14:00.000-08:00

We have heard repeatedly over the last year that HP is about to announce a source code analysis tool that will be open sourced and given away for free. HP will open a Web site, a forge, where this tool will be offered. This tool is about to be announced, but no one outside of HP is sure when that will be.

As I have said before in this space, HP: We welcome you to the software compliance market! We think it's great that you are getting into our market. It’s a big, beautiful market with lots of enterprise, government and technology customers, and a free solution would be a great addition to Black Duck’s protexIP, exportIP and transactIP solutions. (One offering in our space is already offered on a practically free basis!)

Don’t fret, HP. Come on in. The water is fine.

Let it snow

2007-12-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

Heavy snow fell on the Boston-area last night. We sent home the Black Duck employees based in Waltham at 2:00. Pure gridlock occurred all over the Boston area. There were 3,300 snowplows, salters and sanders on the roads (according to WBUR) at the same time that everyone left work and headed home. Abandoned cars abounded along Storrow. I left the office at 3:30 and drove head-on into gridlock. It took me 4 hours and 39 minutes to get home -- the same trip usually takes me 30-40 minutes.

My wife Susana took this picture shortly after I got home. More than 12+ inches of snow fell today over the course of six hours (see photo on left).

Funambol takes the AGPLv3 plunge

2007-12-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

Funambol might be known for what they call their “open source mobile email & PIM sync solution,” but now they're going to be celebrated as being the “first major open source software company” to adopt the AGPLv3 license. Designed to close the so-called ASP loophole, the AGPLv3 requires companies that modify open source software running over a network (as opposed to being delivered on a CD or DVD) to make the source code publicly available.

According to Benjamin Mako Hill of the Free Software Foundation,

The GNU GPL has been the most successful free software license because it makes a program's source available to its users. This enables massive collaboration between developers, since everyone gets the same benefits from this rule. The GNU AGPL will enable the same kind of cooperation around web services and other networked software.

Funambol says the AGPLv3 is consistent with the Honest Public License the company had been developing since late 2006, but it switched to the AGPLv3 to eliminate an unnecessary multiplication of free software licenses.

I think this is a bold decision. This decision reinforces Funambol’s position as a leader in the open source industry. As I wrote in this blog in May 2007: Man up Google! Only time will tell whether other open source companies in the SaaS space will follow suit.

SFLC to Verizon: Can you hear me now?

2007-12-07T16:26:00.000-08:00

There's no question that the number of lawsuits involving Open Source licenses, especially the GPL, is increasing in number and scale. Verizon is the highest-profile target so far: this week the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) slapped the company with a GPL copyright lawsuit over its router software. SFLC says that the router software used with Verizon's new FiOS broadband service uses software based upon BusyBox, which the developers licensed under GPLv2. In such case, the SFLC contends, Verizon must make the source code available – something Verizon has steadfastly refused to do. Meanwhile, the SFPC has also filed three other lawsuits on behalf of BusyBox since the beginning of November.

As Mark Radcliffe first noted on his blog in November, the suits filed on behalf of BusyBox highlight the SFLC's aggressive new GPL enforcement strategy. For the SFLC, failure to release the source code for software based on GPLv2-licensed code is the trigger.

“SLFC consistently takes the position that the failure to comply with all of the terms of the GPL 'terminates' the permission in the license and the licensee becomes a copyright infringer,” Radcliffe writes. He goes on to give companies contacted by SFLC some advice: “The clear lesson from these suits is to respond quickly if SFLC contacts your company and try to resolve the issue promptly.”

For its part, Verizon has had no comment on the case. Now we wait to see what other companies run afoul SFLC and get the worst of all holiday presents – a lawsuit.

American education doesn't compute

2007-12-06T04:30:00.000-08:00

This week the U.S. Education Department released the scores of 4th and 8th graders on national math and reading exams. The results were distinctly underwhelming. Except for the reading scores of Asian students, there was just about no improvement across the board in either math or reading.

Sometimes we knock standardized testing, but when it comes to math, there's only one right answer to a problem, and American kids don't seem to know what it is. As the U.S. struggles to maintain its position as a world superpower in a fiercely competitive global, knowledge-based economy, we need American kids who are getting better and better in math. Can IBM and Microsoft really keep importing scientific and mathematical talent forever?

Look at the Boston Red Sox baseball team. For years they neglected their farm system, only to have to import high-priced (and often overpriced) players from “overseas.” But in this decade the Red Sox have seen the light – they realized they can't be competitive unless they nurtured young talent in their farm system. And look at the results: two World Series titles in four years.

China and India are using the Red Sox formula right now. They're investing billions to train young talent in math and science. When will the United States do the same? Or, according to some, does it even matter?

An “interesting” soirée

2007-12-01T19:31:00.000-08:00

A gathering of founders, CEOs and VCs called "Think Big" was held on Wednesday night at the amazing apartment of Wendy Caswell, President and Chief Executive Officer of Zink. The event was organized by Scott Kirner, Innovation Economy columnist for the Boston Globe, with the best of intentions -- to identify ways to improve Massachusetts' competitive positioning versus other tech magnets, especially California. (This has become a theme in my life.)

Attendees included Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot (blog posting); Bob Weiler, CEO of Phase Forward; Bill Warner, founder of FutureBoston, Avid and Wildfire; Russ Wilcox of E Ink; Jonathan Seelig of Globespan Capital Partners; Bill Schnoor; David W. Baum of Stage 1 Ventures; Misha Katz; John Landry, the always avuncular angel investor from Lead Dog Ventures; Frank Moss of the MIT Media Lab; and Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Ventures among others.

Founding partners Michael A. Greeley of IDG and Paul Maeder of Highland Capital Partners were the featured speakers.

The event was sponsored by Boston Search Group, Goodwin Procter LLP, and KMC Partners. Kudos to these guys.

Almost all attendees left the party saying it was “interesting.” Translation: “I'm glad I attended. It was a top-shelf gathering of diversified, high powered people. I loved the views of the Boston skyline, but the event was bemusing”.

Most of the individual conversations addressed the Massachusetts-California divide more concretely and genuinely than the featured speakers did. Why can’t an honest public conversation be had with a bunch of VCs in the room? Maybe that’s the problem with Boston.

Here are my takeaways from the evening:

Massachusetts-based VCs sitting on venture boards should take the long view and support entrepreneurs who want to hold onto promising companies. In the process, the Boston-area will produce companies with greater enterprise value.

Many large-scale California companies are built on a foundation or in subsequent stages on purchases of East Coast companies.

MIT competes with Stanford in the entrepreneur area, but Harvard doesn't compete at all.

Massachusetts' software industry is done, and our leadership in life sciences is ours to lose. Maeder asserted that Massachusetts can take substantive small steps each year for the coming years and catch up to California in the life sciences.

All in all, I have to agree with the scuttlebutt -- it was a very “interesting” soirée.

But don't take my word for it. Dan Bricklin published both a blog posting and podcast of the event. (Maximum kudos to Dan.) Have a listen and let me know what you think.

A new face for an old friend

2007-12-01T05:49:00.000-08:00

Evolution happens when you least expect it. And sometimes it forces you to rename your blog.

Long story short, recently I was looking for ways of improving my blog when I happened across a couple of CEO blogs. They got me to take a long, hard look at my blog. Before I knew it, Blougtopia was a distant memory and Doug Levin's CEO Blog was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

Don't get nervous about the new name. This won't be just any CEO blog. Honest. You see, my new goal as a blogging CEO is attaining “Godiness.” Or getting as close as any human being can.

The term Godiness comes from Seth Godin, former CEO of Yoyodyne (before he sold it to Yahoo) and marketing blogger extraordinaire. Blogging back in 2004 -- at a time when most people thought a blog was the place where you got cranberries -- Godin warned his readers about CEO blogs. He said the following: “Here's the problem. Blogs work when they are based on: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness and Controversy, (maybe Utility if you want six). Does this sound like a CEO to you?”

I want to prove that Seth's got CEO blogs – or at least my CEO blog – all wrong. So I’m going to try to live up to Seth’s ideals and show the world that CEO blogs can deliver true ROI. Through my newly renamed blog, I will continue to to delve deeper into the blogging mindset as I try to achieve Godiness.

It won't be easy at times. Sometimes I'll feel like phoning it in – or at least using too many compound adjectives. But you can help. In those immortal words of songstress Dionne Warwick, say a little prayer for me. And please keep reading.

Meeting the head of the Boston Fed

2007-11-29T19:47:00.000-08:00

Joyce Plotkin, President of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, invited the Presidents and CEOs from seven Boston-area technology companies – including Diane Hessan of Communispace, Mike Duffy of OpenPages, Shain Huges of Pyxis Mobile, Tom Litle of Litle & Company, Greg Schmergel of Nantero, Jeff Taylor of EONs plus Steve O’Leary, Investment Banker from Jeffries|Broadview -- and me to a meeting with Federal Reserve Bank of Boston CEO and President Eric Rosengren (pictured) and his staff.

This is an irregularly scheduled roundtable discussion that was established to provide the Fed’s Boston branch with ground-level information about how the macro and local economy is working, the status of new company formation, labor and financial market conditions, and other topics. We were asked to describe our company’s general outlook for sales (pipeline issues and IT purchasing), cost and availability of capital, labor market conditions, growth strategies, and the most significant challenges we face.

The consensus of the CEOs was generally positive about the state of their businesses and of the local and US economies. (Dr. Rosengren said "It was relief to hear some good news" from us in contrast to the subprime mortgage situation.) The common denominator: Tight labor markets and the widespread availability of capital. There was significant concern about not enough being done to keep local college grads in Boston, and the attractiveness of high California wages, but we discussed lots of interesting ideas to address these problems.

It was gratifying to learn about OpenPages’ and Communispace’s extraordinary growth and the excellent prospects for growth at EONs, Natero, and Pyxis. I did not learn anything new about Litle: It's still a cash machine that takes very good care of its employees.

Steve O’Leary from Jeffries|Broadview made some excellent points in his introductory remarks, but I'll summarize those points in a separate blog entry.

Happy Birthday Life

2007-11-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

Seventy-one years ago (November 23, 1936) the first issue of Life Magazine was published, featuring a cover photo of the Fort Peck Dam (see photo on left). This dam became one of the US’s greatest public works projects, a vestige of the 1930’s and an icon of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

For most of its existence Life was successful being a sign-of-the-time. I grew up with Life magazine, just like everyone else, and loved flipping its pages and feeling a sense of being connected to current history or with events happening in far and distant places, like Vietnam or the moon. Ultimately, the mission of Life was to show the news, while Time magazine’s mission was to impart the news in an uncomplicated and undemanding way, like a picture in writing.

From History.com: "At its peak, Life had a circulation of over 8 million and it exerted considerable influence on American life" significantly from the 1930’s through the ‘50’s and early '60's but less so in the late 60’s and early ‘70’s.

Time-Warner, however, "stopped bringing out Life as a weekly publication in 1972, when it began losing audience and advertising dollars to television. In 2004, however, it resumed weekly publication as a supplement to U.S. newspapers. At its re-launch, its combined circulation was once again in the millions."

It is no longer published as a hard copy magazine. The inventory of pictures and issues are being placed on the web.

With Brook Shields adorning it's cover, how could Life remain relevant? With cable TV and the Internet offering an incredible array of content, how does Life function other than being a research resource for pictures and news from the 1950's-70's?

Here we grow again ... into Asia

2007-11-21T08:39:00.000-08:00

As a startup matures, the company comes to understand its customers, markets, distribution channels, and the cultures of the counties or regions it serves on a deeper level. There are many data points along the way that serve to inform, but it takes time to parse out the data, make decisions, and take actions.

Black Duck made an early investment in international sales. This stemmed partially from having multinational customers (including Samsung, SAP, and Siemens) very early in the company’s life. It also stemmed from the realization that open source and composite software developments were challenges encountered by companies and developers all over the world –- not just the U.S. market. Also, the company had the management experience to go global.

While some believe that startups and emerging companies in the U.S. should focus on the domestic market until they reach critical mass, I think international expansion is a must-have for any growing company, not simply a nice-to-have. There is especially true at times like the present, when the U.S. economy is facing stormy waters and the weak dollar is making it easier for U.S. companies to expand internationally.

Black Duck is expanding aggressively into Far Eastern markets. On Monday we announced a new partnership with Japan's NEC Corp. to resell Black Duck's flagship product, protexIP. In addition, we announced the signing of Gamatech Ltd., a subsidiary of the Karin Group, and Pacific Advantage International Ltd. (PAL) -- both distributors in Hong Kong.

NEC will use protexIP code analysis and license compliance and sell protexIP in Japan through its own sales force, as well as develop custom solutions that use the product for NEC customers. In Hong Kong, both Gamatech and PAL are partnering with Black Duck. PAL will now operate as Black Duck in Hong Kong.

In addition, back in June, Black Duck announced the addition of three new European partners -- Purple Scout, Software Quality Systems (SQS), and SourceSense.

These new relationships represent channel improvements that will help customers in new ways. This new phase of relationships is possible because we're always listening to our customers, learning from them, and providing them with the complete support and service they need.

In the coming months, we expect to grow even more in the U.S. and Canada and expand into new markets in Asia and EMEA. There are new challenges ahead, but we at Black Duck are confident and excited as we expand into new markets.

"The skinny on GNU GPLv3"

2007-11-19T19:08:00.000-08:00

My discussion with Network World's Jason Meserve about GPLv3, what it means for software developers and the meaning of some licensing terms. Also, tracking GPLv3 trends and a question about the Monsoon lawsuit.

To hear podcast, click here. (14:26)

TechCrunch Boston -- A Happenin' Networking Event

2007-11-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

Around 7-800 people attended TechCrunch Boston on Friday night. It was the best party of the year in the 128 startup-land. There was an army of entrepreneurs in attendance who offered great convo’s, lubricated by lots of beer, martinis, other drinks and great food.

I think it is important to note that IDG Ventures sponsored it and Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch folks organized it. With parties like this one, we can stem the tide of university grads seeking employment and a social life in the Silicon Valley. There was a strong consumer Internet presence, thanks in part to the IDG folks, who recognized the importance of addressing this area of historical weakness in Boston venture funding. Among the IDGers there, I talked with Michael Greeley, Chip Hazard, Jon Karlen and bloggers Jeff Bussgang and David Aronoff.

Others from the finance community in attendance included Michael Skok from North Bridge Venture Partners, Lucy McQuilken from Intel Capital, and Charley Lax from Grandbanks Capital, and John Prendergast from Jefferies Broadview. Also, there were a lot of PR people in attendance, including Ross Levanto, Maura Fitzgerald, and others.

From the blogosphere and related spheres Steven Woit, Pito Salas (his company is BlogBridge and blog), Chris Herot (his company is Zingdom and blog), Scott Kirsner (Boston Globe), Doc Searls, and my good friend, Don Dodge from Microsoft. These guys are heroic bloggers because of the fresh, original content they bring to their blogs.

Kudos to the party givers.

In Italy, life (and OSS) is beautiful

2007-11-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was featured on Italian OSS guru Roberto Galoppini's Commercial Open Source Software blog. I'm a big fan of Roberto, and I enjoyed the chance to share my thoughts about open source risk management. Roberto really gets this area and has a very eclectic view and grasp of software and OSS.

Just last month Roberto gave a speech at a big European OSS conference in Italy. It was about OSS and the enterprise in Europe. Here's the gist:

After mentioning some public and tv ads sponsored by the Italian Government, I reported some findings from the EC-funded project tOSSad - Towards Open Source Software Adoption and Dissemination. The project, aiming at improving the outcomes of the F/OSS communities, proposed to use mass media and branding of Open Source products to address identified weakness.

Lots of good stuff, and I won't steal Roberto's thunder by giving away too many details. If you want to know what's holding back OSS in Europe, not to mention how to make money in OSS if you happen to do business in Europe, do yourself a favor and read his blog post. It's magnifico!

“Inside Open Source”

2007-11-17T15:29:00.000-08:00

Palle Pedersen, the CTO of Black Duck Software, has given birth to a beautiful baby blog: “Inside Open Source”. He plans to do a deep dive into open source software and state-of-the-art application development methodologies. It’s about time! In his first two postings he adopts an economists’ perspective on OSS' massive code reuse and the gross national product of open source software. Both are interesting and timely blog entries. A great start to a new blog. I’m looking forward to his future postings.

Outsourcing on the outs?

2007-11-13T18:27:00.000-08:00

I'm in California this week. The weather is beautiful, especially compared with frosty Boston, but the state is still the land of fruits and nuts. (Get a side-by-side Weather Comparison widget.)

A friend of mine in the software industry who sits atop a publicly held company said to me this week: “Open Source Software has tempered outsourcing by solving the same problem. It’s a matter of engineering expediency: If you add a software library from an open source repository or engage and manage an outsourcer, you go with the open source repository.”

My friend is a very smart fellow, but I don’t see outsourcing abating -- in fact, quite the opposite. A recent McKinsey report reinforces my view indicating that by 2010 the global outsourcing market is expected to reach $130 billion.

There are some chinks in the outsourcing armor. For example, India might no longer be as much of a haven for business process outsourcing (BPO) because of rising wages and rents. The Philippines, Vietnam, and other places are becoming more attractive by comparison.

But slowing BPO in some places does not constitute a change in overall trends. A recent survey that compared BPO figures from three years ago with current figures concludes that use of BPO by midsized businesses (companies with 100 to 999 employees) remained static at about 60% over the three-year period.

I think OSS has had a marginal impact on the growth of outsourcing, and it will probably fuel growth in new ways as outsourcers and offshore entities use more of it based on the encouragement of their OSS-using clients.

Black Duck’s involvement with outsourcers and offshore development organizations is just starting. We have clients on either side of the outsourcing equation -- clients who want to check outsourced code, and outsourcers who are checking their own code (for example, EPAM Systems. These clients are located in the United States and Europe, while our outsourcing clients are located in India, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

As some of the surfer dudes here in California might put it, there are still some mondo BPO waves to ride. Totally gnarly, dude.

Norman Mailer was a Hurricane

2007-11-10T13:33:00.000-08:00

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation."

"Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts."

Norman Mailer
January 31, 1923 - November 10, 2007

Chat with Irving Wladawsky-Berger

2007-11-08T06:58:00.001-08:00

I hosted a Fireside Chat at the historic Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill in Boston last night. It was the third in a speaker’s series I have organized to draw attention to this gem of a building.

This time I chatted with Irving Wladawsky-Berger who is now teaching engineering at MIT but until recently was a very senior technical officer at IBM.

It was a great experience and talk. I asked Irving about the state of innovation at IBM and whether a “near death experience” was always necessary to right the IBM ship. It was interesting to hear from Irving’s point of view that the IBM 360 series was a great innovation – even before the IBM PC – and that IBM mini’s – the Systems 36 was a failure. Irving regarded the Internet as a communications and business vehicle. He was the officer at IBM who drove its Internet strategy.

Irving also provided his perspectives on IBM CEOs including Sam Palmisano, Lou Gerstner, John Akers, John Opel and TJ Sr. and Jr. All of them were very close to IBM customers. Sam impressed Irving with his decisiveness and cited as examples Sam’s decisions to adopt Linux and exit the PC business. TJ Jr. made a "gutsy" decision to do the System 360.

At one point in our chat about innovation Irving said: "You have to determine does the market give you 'brand permission' to introduce a new product." This is a profound question that combines strategy, product management and marketing in the innovation analysis, reflecting Irving's extensive IBM experience. It is equally applicable to startups and emerging companies.

To hear more interesting insights from my chat with Irving see Dan Bricklin’s Log where you can his access the podcast entitled: "Vilna Shul Fireside Chat with Irving Wladawsky-Berger".

Superbowl 41 1/2

2007-11-04T21:51:00.000-08:00

Colts vs. Pats: The ref'ing was awful but the game was the best of pairing of NFL teams this season.

Randy Moss is the best WR in the NFL. He and Brady got the game back on track for the Pats. As my good friend DT says: "They are the truth."

Still the Colts' looked pretty good. Their D was surprisingly fast. Only reason why the Pats won in the end: The Colts' D just wore down in the fourth.

Halloween 2008: In London, Not on Beacon Hill

2007-10-31T13:45:00.000-07:00

Halloween on Beacon Hill is an annual event for us. This year my wife and daughter are carrying on the tradition while I'm in London wrapping up some business. (Click here for more pictures appearing on Webshots.)

While dining at my favorite Indian restaurant, Hot Stuff, in London tonight with our partner Sean Egan from CM-Logic, kids came by the restaurant gathering candy. Traditions are the same. I would prefer to be home, on Beacon Hill, so I include a couple of pictures (above) taken by Ariel.

Saw Doc Searls at a corporate event in London. I love his blog and he's a first class guy.

Red Sox Victory

2007-10-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Sox clinched a 4-3 victory over the hapless Rockies in Denver on Sunday night and swept the series. I was in London but was able to see the game. SKY TV in the UK carried the game and included some Boston-dude as a color commentator -- spraying wet remarks all over the broadcast -- and some British guy who claimed to be the Sox number one fan even though he could not remember Ted Williams name. This game was memorable in many ways.

A Parable

2007-10-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

In late 2002 a band called “The Happy Guys Band” formed in the Boston area. The founder of this band wanted to solve interesting musical problems and build a great band based on integrity and hard work. He had a vision that the band would tour the world, bringing the music he loved to a variety of cultures and a mixture of people with various backgrounds, professional and otherwise. Having a single founder with a vision, real management experience, and values made it easier for this band to thrive.

Today, like back then, the founder of this band was a determined guy. He wanted to make things better for his band mates and the followers of his form of music. He was also patient. He knew that the music he loved was new and innovative, and that not everyone would understand or like it. But he persevered.

Over time, the Happy Guys became more and more successful. This made the founder of the Happy Guys especially happy because he loved the music industry and wanted all his friends who loved music to thrive and enjoy music of all kinds. His band’s success was based on a philosophy of hiring musicians who have a track record of turning out great, great music. Today the band is respected throughout the world because of its music. Each musician in the band could lead their own band, and they all love the journey they are on.

One day, a rival band accused the Happy Guys of stealing musical notes. Of course, musical notes can’t be owned by anyone. But the rival band knew how to make a fuss. And they were sure no one would notice that they had copied those notes themselves. Some people did believe the rival band. How can you blame them? Stealing is bad and that’s what they responded to. But they were not thinking about how music is really made and shared among all musicians.

That made the Happy Guys sad.

Luckily the music industry has a deep and unshakable sense of what is right and wrong. They know that you can’t own musical notes – and that the more people use and share music, the better for everyone. The Happy Guys were happy again and remained so ever after.

The end.

Dogs at the Duck

2007-10-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

Alex is one of the newest members of the Black Duck family. He’s not a full-time employee, contractor, or vendor. He’s not in marketing, sales or engineering.

He’s a puppy.

Trent, a 100% Golden Retriever, remains one of the loves of my life. He is 11½ years old and showing the effects of aging. He’s not
as frisky as he used to be, and he seems to sleep more, but he's just as loving. We enjoy watching lots of football during the weekends, but he’s very particular when we go out for a walk. The stops he makes are very deliberate and no longer random.

Alex is a wonderful mix of Golden Retriever and Yellow Labrador, with a great disposition. He’s got big paws and a nice-sized head. He’s going to be huge when fully grown.

I’m not the only person in the office whose fallen for this dog. Everyone adores him.

He faithfully follows Fred, Black Duck’s manager of IT, around the office, in and out of the server room, around the QA section, and into engineering.

Alex is an office phenom much like “Network” was an office phenom at Sun. While Sun's mantra "The Network is the Computer'' resonated around the globe during the Internet bubble, Sun got great points from dog lovers and others for involving “Network” in their advertising and PR.

Here at Black Duck, Trent has been a part of company life since the beginning, but Alex is definitely the “new school” dog who's making his mark. And that’s totally fine with me.

Black Duck’s “Free and Open Source License Resource Center” -- It's live!

2007-10-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

Today we introduce the first accurate sizing of free and open source licenses in the development environment today.

Black Duck’s “Free and Open Source License Resource Center” went live today. This resource center is an online guide of particular interest to companies developing or deploying software that includes code governed by version three of the GNU General Public License (GPL) or Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Kudos to the Black Duck marketing and engineering teams who that helped create this page; kudos to the spider and QA team who help maintain it.

My Psalm

2007-10-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

We all remember the Little League trophy we received or the ribbon we won at the three-legged race back in third grade. But I have to say that nothing is both so gratifying, and so humbling, as being an adult who has been recognized by his peers.

I experienced these emotions when I was named CEO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council last night, an organization “dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship and promoting the success of companies that develop and deploy technology across industry sectors.”

I'm not reporting this news to brag. Far from it. In accepting the award, I did not have the opportunity to express my feelings and explain my perspective of the value of it.

I'm a firm believer in the notion that success is a team effort – all the hard work by Team Black Duck resulted in this award. I was just the team member who got the recognition. Like Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ quarterback, his offensive line makes him successful each week, and the Pats' “D” delivers up the ball and minimizes the points of the other team. The hard work and dedication of Team Black Duck inspires me and is responsible for realizing the vision of composite software development within enterprises and among a growing community of software developers.

A business is a wonderful thing to grow, develop and expand. Now that the dust has settled from the award, I look forward to working with Team Black Duck to take our vision forward into new markets, with new products and greatly expanded horizons.

And let all the people say, "Amen."

Latest GPLv3 Stats

2007-10-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

As of today Black Duck is tracking 605 GPLv3 projects – up 11% from 9/30 from 545 projects. LGPL3 projects have held steady at 74. This means that we have identified 679 total GPL and LGPL projects flying the V3 flag.

Start it up – or not

2007-10-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

Marc Andreessen is a guy who knows a thing or two about IT startups – first he founded Netscape, then Opsware, and now Ning. According to Andreessen, there are good reasons to do an startup company, and then there are not-so-good reasons.

The good reasons? You can probably guess what they are. Doing a startup gives you the opportunity to:

Control your own destiny
Create something new
Impact the world
Work the way you like, with the people you like
Make $$$

These reasons, to a greater or lesser degree, fan the flames that burn in the hearts of visionaries who found companies. But they're just the beginning, and the devil (and the profits) are in the details.

Simply stated, it takes more than greed or idealism to do an startup. As Andreessen points out, you still will need to:

Take the emotional strain that comes with the ups and downs of starting a new venture
Want to make the decisions. No autopilots need apply
Accept rejection. After all, a lot of VCs – and more than a few of your friends and relatives -- will call you nuts. Some won't even be that nice
Convince talented people to leave cushy jobs to take a chance on your new venture
Work long hours with little immediate reward
Accept a new corporate culture where job descriptions evolve faster than teenage fads
Walk on the sunny side of the street, resisting the temptation to fear the worst

Even this isn't the complete list. “I haven't even talked about figuring out what product to build, building it, taking it to market, and standing out from the crowd,” Andreessen writes.

No, this isn't a line of work for the faint of heart.

After finding inspiration on a beach in sunny Mexico, I started Black Duck Software for all the standard reasons you do a startup. Now, nearly five years later, I'm proud to say we have almost 400 customers, we operate in eight cities with either offices or sales reps, we have 81 great employees, and we are defining a new market as the market leader.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of that little hardware startup known as Apple, had it right when he said the journey is the reward.

DL goes to Washington

2007-09-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, I went down to Washington to testify to the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship as part of hearings with the title "Improving Internet Access to Help Small Business Compete in a Global Economy." There were two panels of experts – including two of the five FCC commissioners -- who shared with the Senators on the committee how important it is for the federal government to develop a national broadband strategy. The message we all delivered was that if the U.S. wants to stay competitive in a global, wired world, we need to make sure that broadband Internet access is both cheaper through increased competition and more widely available, especially in rural areas.

The Democratic and Republican members of the committee, which is chaired by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), listened attentively to our testimony and asked some good questions. When my turn came, I testified that Black Duck's software updates are so richly complex and bandwidth-intensive that we're forced to send them on DVD by snail mail rather than push them through the slow Internet pipes many of our customers are forced to use. I also made the point that a farmer working his field in rural Denmark has faster and cheaper Internet access than someone in New York or Boston.

The hearing was only the first of what I hope will be many more. What we face in America isn't a shortage of ambition to take the Internet in new directions. In fact, I said during my testimony that entrepreneurs are finding a way to succeed in the Web 2.0 world, despite Internet bottlenecks. But not having those obstacles -- at least when it comes to delivering our products and collaborating with talented people around the world – would make what we build that much more powerful to the customers we serve.

By the way, if you'd like to see the all of Wednesday's testimony, keep your eyes peeled for the video that will be archived here. In the meanwhile, I have included some pictures taken by the American Electronics Association who lined me up for this testimony. Let me know what you thought of my testimony, my tie, or both.

OSS Disruptor

2007-09-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

Peter Gali wrote a piece in E-week today that quotes Gartner as saying “open-source software [is] the biggest disruptor the software industry has ever seen and postulated it will eventually result in cheaper software and new business models. Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research."

Mobile open source gets disconnected

2007-09-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

The Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) conference was held in Madrid, Spain this year. Focused on “mobile Linux and open source”, it offered some great networking opportunities (one had flamenco dancing) but no new insights or OSS projects as far as I could determine. There were many seemingly indistinguishable sessions on open mobile Linux and open source technologies, initiatives, and strategies over a two-day period.

In contrast to last year, I think the mobile open source industry had reached a plateau in OSS development and business applications. In Amsterdam last year there was a lot of discussion and demonstration of prototypes of mobile applications, open source phones, standards, and other open source development.

This week most of the attendees had developed infrastructure solutions by adopting both open source components and community development processes. These solutions were “open source” by merit of their components, but on the whole they were mostly proprietary software. This is disappointing. Just as disappointing was the fact that -- except for examples like Nokia’s open source phone and open source initiative, Symbian’s open source platform and community center, and some browsers -- the solutions on display or presented were not created by a concerted open source development process.

And they certainly did not fall onto the copyleft end of the IP spectrum. Bill Weinberg recognized this first. During a panel in Madrid we both served on, Bill said he said that open source processes (especially license-related ones) were shabby in the '90s but have improved in the last 1-2 years.

Meanwhile, “Lefty” Schlesinger from ACCESS avowed that this shortage in broad-based open source development is just a temporary phenomenon. He claimed that more “open sourcey” applications and solutions will appear over the coming months as companies launch their infrastructure products and need to bring more technologies to market in order to attract new customers.

One encouraging open source mobile arrival is the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) championed by Caroline Lewko. This portal has been built on and to foster partnerships and a network of successful companies in wireless. A key concern is developing open source wireless applications. These community organized efforts are bound to help propagate more pure open source development efforts.

These efforts can't come too soon. Given the proliferation of proprietary mobile solutions on the market, developing mobile open source alternatives is definitely a good call.

Open Source Software in Spain

2007-09-19T05:08:00.000-07:00

Attending the OSiM conference in Madrid gave me the opportunity to find out more about the open source community that has developed in Spain.

Turns out that there is small open source community in Spain. One person I talked to ascribed it to lock-hold that Microsoft, especially Windows, has over the market. Another person said that, in general, Spanish developers and IT personnel are not early adopters. Spain is a country populated by a people and culture in the late majority (in Geoffrey Moore – Crossing the Chasm terminology).

The way open source is leaching into Spain is through municipalities who are adopting Linux in their data centers. They then branch out into other open source applications, projects and solutions such as jBoss, Apache and others projects. It is not yet a large market for open source vendors like MySQL, SugarCRM and other commercial solutions according to several people although they have certainly found some early adopters. Bit is the leading Spanish company and open source vendor offering a stack which has found customers in both Spain and the US.

Turns out that in most schools (both primary and secondary) in many regions (such as Extremadura, Andalucia, Valencia and Galicia) teach computing using exclusively Linux-based platforms. According to Paul Brown, editor Linux Magazine Spain, “this will lead in the near future to a generation of users, developers and administrators who will be very familiar with open source solutions which will impact the market to some degree.”

In addition to Paul, several people I talked to believe that open source will “take off” as soon as the systems integrators and developers who symbiotically are tied to the municipalities learn more about OSS and adopt it in solutions. They have strong relationships with medium and large sized corporate clients.

At OSiM, I learned that several telecommunications and mobile companies have open source solutions including Telefonica – the Spanish phone company.

GPLv3 update

2007-09-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

As expected, the latest data indicates more down-to-earth growth rates in deployed GPLv3 licenses.

As of today, GPLv3 exceeded the 500 project level (506), and this represents a 12 percent increase over last week. LGPLv3 hit the 74 project level, a 32 percent week-to-week growth rate. While we can expect variations in the coming weeks and months, these rates are showing more down-to-earth growth.

The total number of deployed GPLv3 and LGPLv3 projects has now reached 580 – a 15% increase over the September 7 level.

SCO Poops Out!

2007-09-14T20:43:00.000-07:00

After failing to convince a U.S. District Court judge last month that they owned the copyrights on Unix and were due royalties from Linux distro's, SCO Group has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

SCO had a simple reason for pursuing the lawsuit: They wanted to use an expected financial windfall to finance the growth of their business. In May 2003 (six months after I founded Black Duck) SCO sued IBM for violating their alleged Unix copyrights (first for $3 billion, then $5 billion), but all but lost the case in 2005. In making his ruling in the SCO-IBM case, that judge gave SCO the legal equivalent of a smack upside the head:

Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.

But SCO was undaunted. Their next legal target? Novell.

Last month, when a different judge turned down their claim against Novell, SCO's stock price plummeted, and SCO's board chose the Chapter 11 route to keep the lights on. As SCO president and CEO Darl McBride told ZDnet,"Chapter 11 reorganization provides the company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans."

Translation: SCO wants to reduce the chance of having to pay much, if anything, to Novell. Last month the U.S. District Court judge ruled that Novell, the defendant in the latest SCO lawsuit, was the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights. And since SCO has been using UNIX in their product line for free, the two companies were scheduled to go back to court on Monday to learn how much royalty money SCO owes.

A large monetary judgment for Novell might well spell doom for SCO – and SCO knows it. With Chapter 11 protection, SCO hopes the judge will let them live to sue another day.

So what can we learn from all of this? It's proof that suing large companies is an reckless business model. No matter how you slice it, innovation almost always works out better than litigation.

Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Open Source Software Reuse

2007-09-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

A podcast on how Black Duck Software helped one company find and ultimately remove some unexpected open source software in their infrastructure product.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1865.html