Black Duck Code Center Enhancements Accelerate Hybrid Software Development
Company streamlines life-cycle management of open source components with version 1.4 release
WALTHAM, Mass., September 9, 2008—Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today released version 1.4 of Black Duck™ Code Center, with enhancements that assist hybrid software development, which combines open source and other code. Software development organizations save time, mitigate risk —and create better applications—when they rely on Black Duck Code Center to closely manage the life cycle of open source code components during development. Code Center also provides integration with Black Duck’s other developer solutions, allowing open source component search, selection, approval, validation and monitoring to be managed within a unified framework.
According to industry research, software is now being sourced from an increasingly diverse set of sources, which augment and in some cases replace internal development resources. IDC reports that nearly half of software development organizations leverage code from external sources that include contractors, outsourced and offshore providers and the open source community, based on a custom survey conducted in April 2008 of 139 respondents from enterprise-size organizations (1000+ employees) (1).
Black Duck solutions automate the management of this increasingly complex hybrid development process. Black Duck Code Center provides a catalog of authorized open source components with detailed component information, and supports a customizable approval process that enables development, legal and executive teams to collaborate around open source policies, gaining the productivity benefit of open source reuse while managing copyrights, licensing obligations, security vulnerabilities, and enforcing other policies related to corporate use of open source code.
“New software is downloaded by anyone with access to the Internet, bypassing the procurement organization that traditionally enforced legal, contractual, financial and other policies,” said Melinda Ballou, program director, Application Lifecycle Management & ITMS, at IDC. “Developers are routinely downloading or even cutting and pasting code – in some cases without understanding implications,” Ballou continued (1). Ballou recently authored a whitepaper titled “Driving Business Agility via a Software Supply Chain,” sponsored by Black Duck Software. The whitepaper is available for download at http://www.blackducksoftware.com/form/70160000000HUVq .
Black Duck Code Center version 1.4 offers features that help development organizations manage the complex nature of hybrid development, which requires the mitigation of licensing, contractual, security and technical risk. With enhancements to the solution announced today, developer teams can create and gain approval for open source software “stacks” that can be reused by other teams. A “stack” consists of layers of software components that work together to provide specific functionality. One well known stack is LAMP, comprised of Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Black Duck Code Center can feature stacks within a company’s internal component catalog using its flexible component hierarchy.
“Whether you call it ‘software component assembly,’ a ‘software supply chain,’ or ‘software re-use,’ the model for software development is about using many different sources for your code,” said Bill McQuaide, executive vice president of products and services at Black Duck Software. “Black Duck Code Center today adds enhancements to organize the complex relationships between open source software components, helping developers ensure that a stack or subsystem abides by a company’s open source and other policies.”
Other enhancements to Black Duck Code Center announced today include:
- Advanced approval workflow: A business process engine controls the customizable approval processes for each open source component. Additionally, developers can upload attachments that document component approvals and provide an approval audit trail.
- Parallel component search: Developers can now search for open source code to reuse in multiple places simultaneously: the company’s own Black Duck Code Center catalog of internally approved components, the Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open source components compiled from thousands of internet sites, www.koders.com , the industry’s leading code search engine, and Google, the well known search site.
- Integration between Code Center and Protex: With Code Center 1.4, the results of a Protex discovery to identify unapproved and unknown code can be fed back into the code management framework supported by Code Center. Code Center now centralizes master approvals of components for the Black Duck suite.
Black Duck will be sponsoring a webinar on Code Center and 1.4 feature updates. To register please refer to the URL www.blackducksoftware.com/news/events/2008-09-10. For more information on Black Duck Code Center, please visit www.code-center.com.
References
(1) Source: "IDC Custom Survey, April 2008"
About Black Duck Software
Black Duck Software is the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development and maintenance costs while mitigating the risks and challenges associated with open source reuse, including hidden license obligations, security vulnerabilities, unsupported open source and version proliferation. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, as well as distribution partners throughout the world. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.
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Editor’s Note: Black Duck, Know Your Code, and the Black Duck logo are registered trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Koders is a trademark of Black Duck Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.
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