Honor Legal Obligations. Mitigate Business Risks. Assure Policy Compliance.

Open source software introduces a new element to strategic business and legal decision making. Uncertainty about code origin and licensing obligations can confuse communication between corporate officers and counsel, on one hand, and engineering and IT departments on the other. Some organizations that could benefit from reusing open source prohibit its use entirely. Now, code provenance and licensing can be easily identified, enabling organizations to govern open source use strategically.

How can you establish best practices to govern code reuse?

• Know your Obligations. Conduct an assessment of your existing code characteristics, including licensing, provenance, and the pervasiveness of code governed by different licenses. Identify and read the relevant licenses. Use an automated system to obtain these as a report, which will also highlight possible conflicts.

• Automate the Discovery and Approval Processes. Put legal counsel and software developers on the same team with rapid access to relevant information. Automation streamlines the discovery and approval processes, bringing compliance into everyday software management.

• Empower Engineering. Augment your existing software management platforms with a workflow system that lets developers find the code they can use and interact online with policy makers.

Black Duck Software offers unprecedented, high-level visibility into mixed-origin code, enabling strategic governance of open source adoption. We help organizations navigate changing software capabilities and legal parameters by implementing effective code reuse policies in a collaborative online environment. Black Duck solutions integrate with existing software management systems and increase in value over time. With Black Duck, your organization can lower costs, increase efficiency, and mitigate risks.

How can you find out more information?

• Find out how Black Duck™ Code Center and Black Duck™ Protex boost productivity with unprecedented access to information across the enterprise, helping developers do their jobs more easily, while facilitating fast, effective communication and compliance assurance.

• Discover a set of Best Practices that companies can use to benefit from mixed-origin software assembly. Read the whitepaper entitled Best Practices for Managing Software Intellectual Property in an Open Source World.

• Learn the five-phase process that provides companies a way to implement their own open source policy. Read the whitepaper, Creating and Implementing An Open Source Policy: Five Steps to Success, by Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica