Today still 10 minutes in my birthday where I tend to be a bit agnostic: I am very happy if friends and people care for me to congratulate, but I don’t make myself a big fuzz about it as for having a “special day” or so.
The birthday evening present for myself therefore was to attend an event from TIE (The Indus Entrepreneur) in Bangalore with Palle Pedersen, CTO from Blackduck and James Black, specialized lawyer in intellectual property from the Silicon Valley. The topic was about “SOA and Software Licensing” which sounds in the first place a bit dry, but turned to be totally worthwhile.
With the advantage that software-components have become encapsulated to the level of services which can be plugged together through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), there is a variety of issues arising in the legal space. Although many of these services are designed as “open source”, the licence implications like GPL can have significant adverse impact on a company if it does not keep track of them and fails in compliance. Worst case scenarios could comprise the obligation to publish the newly written code which was supposed to become proprietary, financial repercussions and loss of reputation in the industry.
Palle Pedersen, a gentleman from Denmark now living in Boston (MA), did a good job not to turn the event into a blunt sales promotion for the Blackduck-product, but he elaborated so nicely about the problem, that everyone in the audience got curious what eventually the company’s solution would be to it.
So in the nutshell: Blackduck’s product allows a company to have its entire codebase screened and compare it with a database containing more or less all open source code available (e.g. from Sourceforge) . The programme would identify the software used and supplement it with the information about the particular licensing agreement attached to it. Hence, the customer of Blackduck would not just get a complete overview of the legal details he would have to follow for each piece of open source, but the system would automatically raise a red flag if there were some critical interdependencies between various licencing models.
Sounds like a really smart solution to a truly existing problem. So no wonder, Blackduck these days announced the third round of US-$ 12 mn VC money to spur its further growth.
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