Black Duck Searches SourceForge Style

Intellectual property (IP) software firm Black Duck Software announced a partnership with SourceForge.net today allowing it to house a replicated version of the open source software repository.

Customers of Black Duck’s protexIP software compliance management platform will use the replicated SourceForge.net to ensure license and IP compliance.

The Black Duck protexIP system helps companies validate
whether they are correctly integrating open source materials inside of their
applications. The system uses “Code Prints” and licensing information in its
knowledge base in order to make the validation.

Black Duck claims that, “protexIP identifies which projects are in use
and alerts users to license obligations and conflicts, enabling automated
intellectual property policy management across distributed development
teams.”

The addition of SourceForge.net’s repository is expected to improve Black
Duck’s existing Web Update service for protexIP since direct access means
that any new additions to the repository will also be immediately available
to Black Duck users.

SourceForge.net is the world’s largest open source software repository
currently boasting almost 104,000 projects (103,911 actual) and 1.1 million
registered users. The replicated version of SourceForge.net is to be located
at Black Duck’s headquarters in Waltham, Mass., and used by its clients as a
comprehensive source of information on open source projects.

In June, Black Duck and VA Software, the parent company of
SourceForge.net announced a partnership to integrate Black Duck’s protexIP with VA Software’s SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE).

SFEE is a separate application from SourceForge.net and is a distributed collaborative tool for developing enterprise class software projects.

In August 2004, Red Hat signed up with Black Duck as part of the Linux distributor’s expanded Open Source Assurance Program efforts.