Comments on: Possible Microsoft Influence in FOSS Press, ISO, India, Portugal, and South Africa http://techrights.org/2009/04/18/iso-india-portugal-south-africa/ Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:35 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Peter Vescuso http://techrights.org/2009/04/18/iso-india-portugal-south-africa/comment-page-1/#comment-62172 Peter Vescuso Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:38:52 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/?p=8888#comment-62172 We at Black Duck view ourselves as open source evangelists, not creators of FUD. Our recent posts on the value of open source and its potential for helping development organizations is intended to highlight its value and increase adoption. Spreading FUD would hurt open source and would hurt our business. We believe open source and commercial businesses are not mutually exclusive. And we're not creating risk - it's out there. We provide a platform that allows commercial development organizations to embrace and use open source at scale, realize the benefits and manage the associated risks and challenges. It's a fact that there is risk in re-using open source code in a commercial product if attention isn't paid to licensing and complying with the associated obligations. Black Duck has made a significant investment to create our KnowledgeBase, a comprehensive database (DB) of OSS, which our customers use to search for open source code that meets their development requirements. Without the ability to find and evaluate OSS that meets their needs, manage and control it, commercial entities wouldn’t be able to embrace open source the way they are. It is this DB of information that we draw upon to provide estimates of OSS, which we do as a way to promote the adoption and widespread use of open source. Plus we contribute the code form the KnowledgeBase to a free code search website we make available to the community (more on that below). Black Duck uses open source and contributes to a number of open source projects (e.g., Pentaho, OpenOffice, serverjs, piston). In addition we maintain a free code search website called www.koders.com for the OSS community. It has 2 billion lines of source code and is used heavily, daily by thousands in the OSS community. In the last year we’ve increased the searchable code base 2.5 X to almost 2 billion lines of code by leveraging information from our KnowledgeBase. Last, the fact that someone (founder or an employee of a company) has worked at Microsoft doesn’t disqualify them as a positive contributor to the OSS community, nor should it immediately cast doubt on their motives. Imagine how many former Microsoft employees actively participate in and contribute to the open source community today. We at Black Duck view ourselves as open source evangelists, not creators of FUD. Our recent posts on the value of open source and its potential for helping development organizations is intended to highlight its value and increase adoption. Spreading FUD would hurt open source and would hurt our business. We believe open source and commercial businesses are not mutually exclusive. And we’re not creating risk – it’s out there. We provide a platform that allows commercial development organizations to embrace and use open source at scale, realize the benefits and manage the associated risks and challenges. It’s a fact that there is risk in re-using open source code in a commercial product if attention isn’t paid to licensing and complying with the associated obligations.

Black Duck has made a significant investment to create our KnowledgeBase, a comprehensive database (DB) of OSS, which our customers use to search for open source code that meets their development requirements. Without the ability to find and evaluate OSS that meets their needs, manage and control it, commercial entities wouldn’t be able to embrace open source the way they are. It is this DB of information that we draw upon to provide estimates of OSS, which we do as a way to promote the adoption and widespread use of open source. Plus we contribute the code form the KnowledgeBase to a free code search website we make available to the community (more on that below).

Black Duck uses open source and contributes to a number of open source projects (e.g., Pentaho, OpenOffice, serverjs, piston). In addition we maintain a free code search website called http://www.koders.com for the OSS community. It has 2 billion lines of source code and is used heavily, daily by thousands in the OSS community. In the last year we’ve increased the searchable code base 2.5 X to almost 2 billion lines of code by leveraging information from our KnowledgeBase.

Last, the fact that someone (founder or an employee of a company) has worked at Microsoft doesn’t disqualify them as a positive contributor to the OSS community, nor should it immediately cast doubt on their motives. Imagine how many former Microsoft employees actively participate in and contribute to the open source community today.

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