Stop treating Black Duck like a Free/Open Source software (FOSS) expert

Summary: Under the traditionally misleading title "Future of Open Source" Black Duck expresses its desire for proprietary software sales, salivating over fearful managers who may get bamboozled into buying the patents-'protected' Black Duck 'product'

THE nasty proprietary software firm called Black Duck is doing it again. Not enough journalists have grasped what this firm is all about.

ECT has just given a platform (again) to this FUD firm and so has SJVN in ZDNet. Do journalists not realise that the so-called "Future of Open Source Survey" (we wrote about this misnomer before [1, 2, 3]) is conducted by a proprietary software company (anti-copyleft)? They should stop pretending they're a FOSS firm, they are a proprietary software company with software patents. It's a company that essentially came from Microsoft and continues to serve Microsoft's agenda in many ways. When Black Duck says many companies use FOSS it's just basically telling its investors, "look, we have lots of market share to which to sell proprietary software blobs to."

"These firms don't produce any Free software, they merely exploit it and spread fear of it, in order for them to make money."When people like Katherine Noyes write about it in IDG they legitimise Black Duck and have us listen to some proprietary softare company with anti-GPL roots as if we are going to learn about FOSS from its foes. There have been some more coverage of this from Microsoft-friendly and Microsoft-hostile sources. Black Duck writes about FOSS being widespread for the same reason anti-swine flu vaccine manufacturer would tell us swine flu spreads and is a huge/growing risk.

Here is the press release [1, 2] that got it started, preceded by this this shameless self promotion. The Linux Foundation gave spotlight to the former OSDL head who now works for Black Duck. The Linux Foundation did this without disclosing Black Duck payments to the Linux Foundation.

Incidentally, Veracode, which recently had its key staff join Black Duck, keeps shoving "Heartbleed" nonsense (branding for FUD) into headlines again, joining the new chorus that keeps "Heartbleed" in the public's mind.

These firms don't produce any Free software, they merely exploit it and spread fear of it, in order for them to make money.

Just because a firm has access to source code or talks about source code doesn't mean it's a FOSS proponent. Today in New Zealand we see the manager of a proprietary software company, Github (just monetising FOSS/Git), defending proprietary software. One needs to be careful in distinguishing Free software proponents from Free software parasites, especially those whose business model depends on creating fear (or increasing fear) of Free software. ⬆