Govern Software License Compliance. Manage Component Reuse.

U.S. national interest has traditionally been best served by growing a wide, deep, and agile technology base. The Federal Government balances the need for protecting sensitive government assets with promoting agility through open technology development and leveraging the benefits of open source software.

Military and government agencies increasingly embrace a model of distributed, component-based software development and reuse. The Federal Enterprise Architecture, Federal CIO Council and OSD have all acknowledged the need for Federal agencies to manage compliance with open source license obligations while implementing component reuse practices to meet mission objectives faster.

How can you lower costs while managing compliance?

• Accelerate Software Deployment. By supporting the proactive management of code reuse, government agencies benefit from lower costs and quicker time-to-deployment. Use of open source components can result in dramatic cost savings as well.

• Automate Software Assurance. Implementing a software acceptance policy through manual validation and verification techniques is slow, painstaking, and error-prone. Given the complexity of tracking software component pedigree and complying with intellectual property licensing, automating this process not only saves time but eliminates manual error.

• Manage Compliance throughout Your Organization. In today’s mixed-source development environment, program managers, software developers, acquisition officers, and legal teams need a single, collaborative platform to enable informed decisions about software development policy, governance, and acceptance criteria. Otherwise, varying interpretations can pull them in different directions, slowing development and undermining control over software assets.

Black Duck provides a software compliance management suite that helps developers mitigate risk by automatically validating the authorized and appropriate use of open source software within their projects. The system provides a common automated platform on which software development managers, program managers, acquisition specialists and legal counsel collaborate to enforce organizational policy and effect governance. This supports an accelerated pace of development as well as a heightened sensitivity to license obligations and any unique controls required by the Federal government.

How can you find out more information?

• Download the Black Duck™ Protex (Government Edition) and learn how the Black Duck Protex platform helps enterprises govern how their software components are specified, developed, acquired, and licensed.

• Learn a set of Best Practices that companies can use to avoid the risks and gain the benefits of this promising new approach to software development. Read the whitepaper entitled Best Practices for Managing Software Intellectual Property in an Open Source World.

• View the PowerPoint presentation of Developing an Open Source Governance Strategy.