Black Duck Software Acquires Koders, Inc.
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.
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:
- 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 This capability can be used to uncover licensing violations, security issues, unsupported open source code, and outdated code.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.
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5 comments:
Its amazing ! Over 30,000 developers each day are searching and accessing open source code,methods, examples,
algorithms and solutions over 766 millions lines of code written in 30 languages and are identified with 28 software licenses........
Software Development
Here is Roberto Galoppini's really astute comments:
http://robertogaloppini.net/2008/04/30/open-source-governance-blackduck-acquires-koders/
Here is Wade Rouch's throughout X-Economy coverage:
http://www.xconomy.com/2008/04/28/black-duck-swallows-up-koders-code-search-engine/
From the perspective of a cash-strapped startup, I think that Koders is a great acquisition. It lets developers leverage appropriately licensed (for their company) FOSS code to build their applications. Since they know what's going in, when it comes time for a "due-diligence" activity on the IP ownership, the development team can be pretty confident that everything is OK, and that a Black Duck audit will probably show it to be clean. I would also use the open source Fossology tool to cover FOSS code introduced from sources other than Koders.
If I was an investor in Black Duck, I would be asking why the Koders business will not cannibalize your Code Center product. Here's why. If I was a large prosperous software distributor, why even cough up the $25k to buy Code Center? I would just install the Koders plugins into the developer IDEs and tell the developers to use it, as long as they don't use unacceptable licenses (which I would tell them about). I would, of course, expect that any copyright and license information from Koders would be of the same quality as from a Black Duck audit...otherwise, why use Koders when Google Code Search, Krugle, or whatever can get you the same access to FOSS search capability?
On the contrary, Koders.com and Black Duck Code Center are very complementary. Koders.com helps engineers find code fragments, files or components to help solve engineering problems– this is very empowering for developers. Black Duck Code Center provides an enterprise-wide framework for open source component management. It supports a structured approval process so that external code can be formally reviewed by managers and policy administrators before being checked into the code base. As components are accepted, the organization builds a catalog of approved components promoting reuse and standardization. Subsequently, component usage is tracked among projects, enabling lower cost maintenance. Black Duck Code Center allows open source management to take place within the context of a large, distributed development team consisting of tens, hundreds or even thousands of developers.
By the way, when we talk about policy administration, we are talking about providing visibility into security vulnerabilities, version proliferation, contractual obligations and overall architectural compatibility in addition to licensing. Not to imply that licensing is not a challenge. At Black Duck we have cataloged over 1,200 different open source licenses. In large, dynamic development organizations with complex sources of supply (outsourcers, partners, vendors, etc, …), the legal department can add value in helping development teams properly navigate the complexities and nuances of different software licenses.
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