Bonum Certa Men Certa

Corporate Media Should Stop Grooming Black Duck by Calling it 'Open Source' and Repeating Its Lies

Doug Levin



Summary: Black Duck uses gullible (or easy to manipulate) journalists to spread its marketing talking points, which grossly overstate risks of using Free software

THE Microsoft-connected firm Black Duck was started as an anti-GPL entity, by its very own admission. This firm which keeps openwashing itself at every opportunity is purely proprietary and it holds patents on software. So how can one be fooled into characterising it as "the open source vendor", as this new article does? ChannelWeb calls it "open source". That's like calling a demolition company "builder". This article is basically a container of typical FUD, not checked for accuracy but just parroted, based on the vendor's claims (trying to sell its own proprietary software): "He said 80 per cent of enterprises using open source do not know what type of open source code they have, where it is located or if there are any vulnerabilities in it - something his firm's offering helps with."



What about vulnerabilities in proprietary software? Many of them cannot be fixed, they are not remediable. What about proprietary software licences? Have they decided to ignore what the BSA does to British businesses?

"Black Duck is just trying to make money by scaring businesses and making them dependent on proprietary snake oil."ChannelBiz, at the same time (also in the UK) published similar nonsense which may suggest that Black Duck is quite probably pressuring British journalists to print (or reprint) Black Duck nonsense. Here is how the latter put it: "Bland said that while nearly 80 percent of enterprise companies are using open source, a majority acknowledge that they don’t know what open source code they have, where it is located, or if it has known security vulnerabilities. And few, he said, have any open source management processes."

Taking points again. Not even an independent study.

Black Duck is an ugly parasite that should be shunned by the Free software community. Black Duck is just trying to make money by scaring businesses and making them dependent on proprietary snake oil.

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