GPL and Related License Adoption Rates

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

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.

Microsoft's mesh-ianic complex

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.

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.

Copyright is cool

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A beautiful day in the open source neighborhood

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.

Questioning the Gartner Report

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

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

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

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.

Total Growth of Open Source Software

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

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.

Today's software license landscape

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.

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

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.

A Deeper Dive into FOSSology

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.